Alexander A. Parker (1908-1989)

Abstract

In 1961 don Xavier de Salas, the highly intelligent and learned ‘Director del Instituto de Espana en Londres’ (who would become and remain for years curator of the Prado Museum) wrote to me in Edinburgh, inviting me to visit him. At our meeting he told me that he had good reason to believe that Professor Alexander Parker would look agreeably to an invitation to fill the position of Head of the Department of Hispanic Studies (then Department of Spanish) in the University of Edinburgh. I was quite astonished. As Professor Ian Michael has elegantly explained in his ‘British Preface’ to the 1984 issue of the BHS, Golden Age Studies in Honour of A. A. Parker, Alec at that time occupied the Cervantes Professorship in King's College, London, in a department that was undoubtedly one of the best in Great Britain, counting among its members Rita Hamilton, Rafael Martinez Nadal, R. O. Jones, J. S. Cummings, and Jack Sage, and I could not understand what we could offer to compete with such a constellation of luminari...