Dan McQuade And Wuthering Heights

Dan McQuade

Sebastian Stockman | Saturday Letter | 8th February 2026

Memories of a friend who died at the age of only 43. Dan McQuade was a sportswriter in Pennsylvania and a connoisseur of "life’s inconveniences and absurd juxtapositions". This writer met him in college and ever since they had shared a deep love of the "bad lede", the opening paragraph of an article that deploys layers of inappropriately tortured metaphor. Several excellent examples are given (1,100 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

Editor's note: we apologise for the recent bug in the system! Nomido is back, and with a new meta-challenge: instead of finding a phrase of the day, find four words that share a theme.

Twenty-One Reactions To Wuthering Heights

Rossetti, Woolf et al | Common Reader | 9th February 2026

As the curator here rightly says, "there is no indifference to Wuthering Heights". Critics have been delighting in or deploring Emily Brontë's only novel since it was first published in 1847. One anonymous reviewer from 1848 considered it to be the author's devilish cheese dream. Dante Gabriel Rossetti thought it a "fiend of a book". Swinburne called it a poem. F.R. Leavis declared Emily Brontë a genius (4,000 words)