The blue plaque to honour and commemorate Salvador de Madariaga’s periods of residence in Old Headington (‘Scholar remembered’, October 18), which, when he and his family first moved in, was Boxtrees, 3 Church Road (subsequently Box Tree House, 3 St Andrew’s Road) is extremely welcome, not least because he was a person of boundless talent and European idealism.

In June 1929, Boxtrees played host to another extraordinary talent: the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, briefly in England on his way to New York with his friend Fernando de los Rios.

Don Salvador was ‘out of town’ when Lorca and his friend arrived in Oxford, so it fell to Madariaga’s Scottish wife, Constance, to meet the two at Oxford Station and show them around Oxford, before making their way to Boxtrees and dinner with the Madariagas and the Oxford hispanist, Helen Grant.

In 1979, Professor Grant recalled that Don Salvador, like his neighbour-to-be, Isaiah Berlin, was a great talker and dominated the conversation yet also remembers “the sad look” in the great poet’s eyes. Lorca was killed by Fascist thugs, outside his home town of Grenada, August 18, 1936, aged 38, and left to the world some of the most beautiful poems in 20th-century literature in any language.

Whenever I pass 3 St Andrew’s Lane, I recall these lines from Lorca’s poem ‘Despedida’ (Farewell) : “Si muero, /dejad el balcon abierto!” (If I die,/leave the balcony open): Salvador de Madariaga understood very well how essential it was to leave that balcony open.

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH Bowness Avenue Headington