Sir – The blue plaque to honour and commemorate Salvador de Madariaga’s periods of residence in Old Headington (Plaque unveiled at Spanish scholar’s home, October 20), which, when he and his family first moved in, was at Boxtrees, 3 Church Road (subsequently Box Tree House, 3 St Andrew’s Road), is extremely welcome, not least because Salvador de Madariaga was in all his manifestations one of the greatest Europeans of the last century. In June 1929, ‘Boxtrees’ played host to another peerless talent: the poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, briefly in England on his way to New York with his and Madariaga’s friend, Ferdinand de los Rios.

Don Salvador was ‘out of town’ (see Ian Gibson’s Lorca biography) when Lorca and his travelling companion arrived in Oxford, so it fell to Madariaga’s Scottish (economic historian) 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 she also remembered “the sad look” in the visiting poet’s eyes, ever aware of death on the edge of life.

Lorca was killed by Fascist thugs outside his home town of Grenada on August 18, 1936, aged 38, and left to the world some of the most beautiful poems and plays of 20th-century literature in any language.

In passing 3 St Andrew’s Road it’s possible to hear 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, Headington