Anne Applebaum

My favorite Polish foods are the soups, and particularly the sour soups, which I don't think I've ever had anywhere else. Zurek, sour bread soup, as well as chlodnik, a cold soup made with beetroot and yogurt, are really unique to Polish cuisine.

Many Americans, but Republicans in particular, long opposed the nationalization of industry and state-controlled companies that are more common in Europe. Instead, they were proud of the American commitment to both economic and political freedom.

The U.S.S.R. was a totalitarian state in which judges and prosecutors were controlled by the ruling party. The result was injustice, oppression and corruption.

Politics in Slovakia had long been a battle between egotistical men. Caputova sought to be the anti-ego alternative.

Leon Trotsky, Stalin's worst enemy, was far and away his most influential 20th-century interpreter, shaping the views of a generation of historians, from Isaac Deutscher onward.

Under Freud's influence, many ambitious biographers - not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians - have sought answers in their subject's childhood.

It isn't citizens, or Congress, who decide how our information network regulates itself. We don't get to decide how information companies collect data, and we don't get to decide how transparent they should be. The tech companies do that all by themselves.

We now expect Google, Facebook, Twitter and other companies to police the Internet for dangerous and illegal material - violent, terrorist, criminal - and some democratic governments require them to do so. But what if they did decide to repress material for political reasons? How would we know?

If we can't have a public debate because the information space is so polluted, or because people are afraid of the reactions of organized trolls, then we can't really have meaningful elections anymore, either.

Even in Poland, where the president is far less powerful than the prime minister, people have a deeper and more atavistic relationship with the person who is a serious contender to become head of state. They want their national leader - the tribal chief - to look like them, to live like them, to reflect their values.

As a journalist, I know what it is like to incur the self-righteous wrath of people who denounce you for things you didn't say or didn't mean.

Clearly, the qualities Poles admire in a secretary of state - foreign languages, diplomatic experience, even sense of humor - are emphatically not those desired in a head of state: So be it.

Just about every single person who visits me in Poland tells me that everything here is better than they thought it would be - especially the food.

The crisis of Western values has many aspects, many faces. There is a decline in faith in liberal democracy, a loss of confidence in universal human rights, a collapse in support for all kinds of transnational projects.

Democracy in some ways is a very illogical political system. When you win an election, you have to preserve the institutions that would make it possible for your political enemies to win next time. If you think about it, that's almost antithetical to human nature.

The relationship of Trump to Russia has been reported on, and the activity to change the Republican platform happened openly, and Trump's support for Russian policy - Russia's views of Europe and its views of NATO - have been stated. So it's not like this is secret.

Do not read 'Hard Choices' if you seek a nuanced analysis of the people who run the world's foreign policy, let alone any juicy gossip.

I am not sure when it became de rigueur for presidential candidates to publish a work between hard covers, but nobody now runs for high office without having written, or having arranged for the ghostwriting of, a very large book.

The idea of social realist art and of Marxist journalism was that: 'We're going to tell people not what things were like, but what they should be like, and what they will be like, and we'll get them to keep focusing on the future.'

One of the obsessions that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties had was always controlling the message - all information that everybody gets has to be carefully controlled and monitored. Art was no exception.

Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite - the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite.

From my point of view, the Dreyfus affair is most interesting because it was sparked by a single cause celebre. Just one court case - one disputed trial - plunged an entire country into an angry debate, creating unresolvable divisions between people who had previously not known that they disagreed with one another.

Profound political shifts - events that suddenly split families and friends, cut across social classes, and dramatically rearrange alliances - do not happen every day in Europe, but neither are they unknown.

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.

At different times my children went to Polish, British, and American schools, and they learned about 'the nation' in all of them.

After Trump became president, it was really too late to investigate his dodgy investments in Azerbaijan or his links to Russian money laundering. Those stories should have eliminated him from business, and from public life, long before 2016.

In the 1980s and 1990s, anglophone conservatives were motivated by ideas so powerful that they spread from the United States and Britain to the rest of the world: faith in democracy, faith in free markets, faith in free trade.

European leaders have learned that there is no point in seeking agreement with Trump, for he doesn't respect those who do.

One of the reasons why many British voters chose to leave the European Union was because they distrusted European institutions. Of all the many costs of Brexit, this was one I did not foresee: That it could wind up damaging the nation's faith in its own institutions too.

Even in the best of times, the United States' ability to influence events in faraway places is limited. The tools we have, from soft power and diplomacy to sanctions and bombing campaigns, are never guaranteed to succeed.

All over the world, the Trump administration is pursuing a range of policies: tweeting insults at Maduro, negotiating with a defiant North Korea, sending a small fleet of warships to the Persian Gulf to intimidate Iran. But the speed with which the president always sours on these efforts means they can never be part of any discernible strategy.

Everywhere he goes, Trump is bored by working meetings and rude to those who attend them. He can't make deals or negotiate because he doesn't know enough about the issues.

As in nature, so in politics: Every action has a reaction.

Elections are always a Rorschach test - people look at the results and see what they want to see.

There is nothing inevitable about this secret offshore world. It is not a fact of nature: Our laws created tax havens, and our laws can also end them. We could forbid Goldman Sachs from owning opaque offshore vehicles. We could prevent companies such as Cadre from accepting anonymous investments.

Shell companies can be owned by other shell companies; opaque offshore vehicles are carefully designed so that regulators can't identify who is using them; with the right accountants, they can be set up quickly and easily.

Five years after the Chernobyl disaster, in the summer of 1991, the last summer the Soviet Union was still in existence, I visited Ukraine. I trekked out to the 20-mile exclusion zone - it had been cleared of all people after the accident - together with some local environmental activists.

Russian scorn for liberal democracy has a long history, and a certain kind of Russian disdain for the West is nothing new. As far back as 1920, Lenin declared that parliaments were 'historically obsolete' and predicted that it was just a matter of time before they disappeared.

Many bad books have had great influence.

Trump is no good at deals and never has been.

All nations are imagined communities, and our imagined community is based on a uniquely inspiring set of principles. Americans have proved that they can be loyal to, and will fight on behalf of, a more complex, more cerebral national ideal, one derived from ideas of democracy and justice as opposed to blood and soil.

Quite a lot has been written, including by me, about the effect of social media on politics, and in particular the way in which the algorithms built into Facebook and YouTube are more likely to spread angry, extremist and deliberately provocative political language.

Of course, isolationism will not keep America isolated.

Americans might not want to intervene in the outside world, but the outside world will still want to intervene in America.

Like wealth, or health, political freedom may simply be something that people don't value if they've always had it.

Clearly, the inhabitants of stable democracies find it hard to appreciate what they have: 'You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone' isn't just a song lyric; it's an expression of something fundamental about the human brain.

In the United States, the world's most important democracy, Congress seems permanently deadlocked, in hock to moneyed interests, unable to grapple with the big issues of climate change, technological change, the information revolution.

Italians have famously low levels of trust in their government, and a tradition of medical hoaxes.

Birtherism surely increased Americans' distrust of politics, though in ways that are hard to pin down. By contrast, when anti-vaxxers persuade parents not to vaccinate children, the result can be sickness and even death.

Alongside the flat-earthers, 9/11 truthers and Obama birthers, the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists have always had a special distinction: They can do immediate and specific damage in a way that the others can't.