What Taylor is referring to with "Gladstone Ministry" is not the contemporaneous British government, but rather what Gladstone seemed to represent in Taylor's portrait of Bismarck. Gladstone was a liberal politician who dismantled a number of conservative British institutions and championed various Liberal causes. Taylor and other biographers of Bismarck have noted that the Chancellor held a deep animus for the Hohenzollern Crown-Prince Frederick III, who held some sympathies for German Liberalism. Taylor's biography asserted that one of the fears that animated Bismarck was that Frederick III or another royal figure like Prince Alexander of Battenberg would use the vagaries of the Bismarckian constitution to force the Iron Chancellor out of office and appoint a liberal as Chancellor who would then create a more liberal Germany.

As for "man of our own times," it is helpful to consider both Taylor's picture of Bismarck and the historian's wider opinions on Germany. In Taylor's formulation, Bismarck was a "white revolutionary" who used revolutionary means to achieve conservative ends. While not ignoring Bismarck's flaws, Taylor does dismiss Bismarck's fears of a German Gladstonianism as a phantom, the biography contends that once Bismarck achieved his aims of unifying Germany under the Prussian aegis, the Chancellor hewed to a cautious and logical Realpolitik. This was part of the reason why Taylor did not hesitate to label Bismarck as a genius in that he supposedly reigned in the worst instincts of Prussian/German statesmen. Germany, according to Taylor, was an artificial creation of modernity with no true natural or cultural boundaries, as such her ambitions were unbounded. One of Taylor's trouble-making quips was that "the only thing wrong with Hitler was that he was German." Taylor felt that while Hitler's domestic policy was a break with tradition, his expansive foreign policy was not (such a sharp distinction that contemporary historiography of Nazi Germany have long since discarded). For Bismarck to check these aggressive tendencies was an accomplishment according to Taylor, and thus reflective of the lessons Europe had supposedly learned over the course of two world wars to check German aggression. For example, in an earlier 1938 work on German colonial policy, Taylor noted that while Bismarck's colonial schemes were "as unscrupulous as they were elaborate," Bismarck had "left an unfortunate example to his successors who imitated his unscrupulousness without possessing his genius." Although "successors" meant Wilhelm II, it could also be applied to the then contemporary Third Reich as well as Weimar.