The Barcelona publishers of his final book ­ which he completed in the weeks before his death ­ described him truthfully

The Barcelona publishers of his final book ­ which he completed in the weeks before his death ­ described him truthfully as “uno de los grandes cervantistas del siglo XX”.Edward Calverley Riley came from a Wiltshire family, but spent his early years in Mexico and Cuba. His father was a mechanical engineer from Swindon who became chief engineer of the Cuban railways. Ted could converse in Spanish as a child, although he always maintained that his sister Jan spoke it better than he did. In 1933, at the age of 10, he was sent to Clifton College in Bristol, where he spent his whole school career, returning only rarely to his parents in Cuba. At Clifton his affection for the cinema began, and he used to enjoy bunking off on illegal visits to the local picture-house.He went up to Queen’s College, Oxford, to study French and Spanish, but it was war-time and after a year he joined the Navy.

He served from 1943 to 1945 on anti-submarine patrols off the Scottish coast and later in the Mediterranean. Afterwards he said very little about his experiences, but enough for people to know that there had been some terrible moments. He preferred to recount the sometimes spectacular malfunctions of His Majesty’s Forces ­ such as when he was among a packed train-load of young sailors who arrived, after a long, arduous journey, in the far north of Scotland only to discover that their ship was waiting for them at Liverpool.Riley returned to Oxford after the Second World War and completed his degree and did postgraduate research. During one long vacation, with his friend and fellow Hispanist Peter (now Sir Peter) Russell, he negotiated the appalling roads of 1940s Spain in a pre-war Austin 10 as they searched out 14th-century battlefields. In 1949 he was appointed assistant lecturer at Trinity College Dublin. Within four years he was head of the Spanish department, although it was not until 1965 that a full professorship was created for him.One of his students in the late 1950s was the biographer Ian Gibson. He found Riley’s lectures on Don Quixote a revelation: “He taught me about structure and perspective in the Quixote and, above all, about irony, and even the remarkable concept that a story could have an untrustworthy narrator.” Another Trinity student, Sebastian Balfour, now Reader in Spanish studies at London School of Economics, was delighted to be pointed in the direction of Cervantes’s brilliantly ingenious short plays, his Entremeses.A student of his myself, I was enthralled ­ and sometimes, it must be admitted, daunted ­ by his understated but intense scholarly passion for Don Quixote.

I remember him in those days at Trinity as kindly towards his students and a supportive but demanding teacher. He was reserved then, even shy, but still able to enjoy long, sherry-fuelled, but confidence-inducing, conversations with students at those noisy early-evening parties which were a TCD speciality.In 1965/66 he took a year out to teach at Dartmouth College in the United States. While he was away a young lecturer called Judith Bull from London University was appointed to the Trinity Spanish department. Five years later Riley moved on to the chair at Edinburgh University ­ although very happy in Dublin, he had not wanted to spend the whole of his professional life at one institution He and Judy were married in 1971.