In this overview, we discuss the (Schwartz) distributional stress–energy quadrupole and show it is a source of gravitational waves. We provide an explicit formula for the metric of linearised gravity in the case of a background Minkowski spacetime. We compare and contrast the two different representations for quadrupoles taken by Dixon and Ellis, present the formula for the dynamics of the quadrupole moments, and determine the number of free components. We review other approaches to the dynamics of quadrupoles, comparing our results.