Thus the graffiti on the walls of the Portakabins where, if you got to them later than 9am, you’d be greeted by a 5ft-high pile of soldiers’ faeces:

Toilet 7: “I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds’; ‘I am become Bored, Destroyer of Motivation”

Toilet 3: “Though I walk through the valley of death I shall fear no evil, because I am the meanest motherfucker in the valley.”

Toilet 6: “MARINE – Muscles Are Required, Intelegance [sic] Not Essential”

Toilet 2 (women only): “I miss my cat.”

‘…comics provided one with a directness of approach (the attractively overstated combination of pictures and words) that seemed unassailably true on the one hand and marvellously close, impinging, familiar on the other. In ways that I still find fascinating to decode, comics in their relentless foregrounding – far more, say, than film cartoons or funnies (neither of which mattered much to me) seemed to say what couldn’t otherwise be said, or wasn’t permitted to be said or imagined, defying the ordinary processes of thought, which are policed, shaped and reshaped by all sorts of pedagogical as well as ideological pressures. I knew nothing of this then, but I felt that comics freed me to think and imagine and see differently.’

‘The performance of the year, it turned out, was on TV, not at the movies. In the fourth season of The Sopranos, Edie Falco proved that there’s almost no one out there fit to compare with her. Thwarted in love, insulted, wounded, and finally rising up in rage and anguish against her entire existence, her Carmella Soprano was the richest and most thoroughly conceived performance of the year by man or woman. The season finale was more like Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage than conventional American TV drama, with Falco working every level of her incredible range, from emotional catatonia to screaming fury and back, without a false note.’

‘Collecting can be a sort of lovesickness. If you begin collecting living things, you are pursuing something imperfectible, and even if you manage to find them and then possess them, there is no guarantee they won’t die or change. The botanical complexity of orchids and their mutability makes them perhaps the most compelling and maddening of all collectible living things. There are nearly twenty thousand named species of orchids — it is the largest flowering-plant family on earth. New orchids are being created in laboratories or discovered every day, and others exist only in tiny numbers in remote places. To desire orchids is to have a desire that can never be fully requited. A collector who wants one of every orchid species will die before even coming close.’

‘The thought of Brian Bendis sitting at the computer, alone in his study, brow furrowed in concentration as he struggles to satisfyingly craft a serious sex scene involving fucking ANT-MAN (or, as the case may be, Ant-Man fucking), is comical. The thought that there is a significant number of people who have the desire to actually read such a story is less funny, and to me, very tragic.’

‘Having the capital cost of equipment drop to effectively zero allows you to think bigger. You start thinking about the whole thing. For instance, the gutsy maneuver of saying “let’s index it all,” which was the breakthrough of Altavista. Altavista in 1995 was an astonishing achievement, not because of the hardware — yes, that was interesting and important from a technical perspective — but because of the mindset. “Let’s go index every document in the world.” And once you have that sort of mindset, you can get really far. So if all books are 20 TBs, and 20 TBs are $80,000, that’s the Library of Congress. Then something big has changed. All music? It’s tiny. It looks like there’re only one million records that have been produced over the last century. That’s tiny. All movies? All theatrical releases have been estimated at 100,000, and most of those from India. If you take all the rest of ephemeral films, that’s on the order of a couple hundred thousand. It’s just not that big. It allows you to start thinking about the whole thing.’