Variations on the phrase ‘the policy of entente’ were applied without any great precision by British diplomatists in the years immediately before the Great War to describe the foreign policy of their country since the turn of the century. The questions of what that policy was, and of why it was what it was and not something else, are not made easier to answer by the fact that almost everyone involved in the making and executing of foreign policy had a view, not only of what the policy was, but of what it ought to be. Nevertheless, in its attempt to establish what were Britain's priorities in her relations with the Great Powers of Europe, those are the questions which this work addresses.

The existing interpretation of British foreign policy before the outbreak of war in 1914 has been encouraged by the following works: G. W. Monger, The End of Isolation (London, 1963); Z. S. Steiner, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy 1898–1914 (Cambridge, 1969), and Britain and the Origins of the First World War (London, 1977); K. Robbins, Sir Edward Grey – a Biography (London, 1971). F. H. Hinsley's The Foreign Policy of Sir Edward Grey, a collection of essays from many individuals working separately, commissioned in the mid-1960s but appearing only in 1977, and P. M. Kennedy's The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism 1860–1914 (London, 1980) are the latest additions to this particular literature.