I first met Bernard Levin on a BBC Face the Music panel. I was there as a curiosity — a woman with a foreign accent, elected president of the Cambridge Union. He was there as a celebrated columnist for The Times, an intellectual with an encyclopedic knowledge of music. It was 1971. I was 21, he was 42.

He knew nothing about me. I had had a major intellectual crush on him since I discovered his writings while at Girton. I had devoured his book The Pendulum Years and would meticulously cut out his columns, underline them and save them in a file (no, I did not put pressed flowers in the file, but might as well have). So when I found out that he was on the panel, I was reduced to a bundle of inarticulateness. I’m still amazed that in my fog I managed to recognise Schumann’s Fourth Symphony.

At the end of the taping he asked me out to dinner the following week. All I remember is that I spent the week prepping, getting myself up to date on Northern Ireland, the recent developments in the Soviet Union and the latest Wagner recordings. I must have bored him to death, because for the second date he took me to Covent Garden to see Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. I spent the time between the dinner and the opera date reading about Die Meistersinger, and considering that more has been written about Wagner than anybody except Jesus Christ, there was a lot to read.

I thought of that night as soon as I heard the news of Bernard’s death last week because, as the curtain was going up, he whispered to me: “That’s the opera I want to hear just before I die.”

We started a relationship that was to last until the end of 1980 when I left London to move to New York. And he was, in many ways, the reason why I left London. I was by then 30, still deeply in love with him but longing to have children. He, on the other hand, never wanted to get married or have children.

What was touching is that he saw this not as a badge of independence and freedom like many men but as a character flaw, almost a handicap. As he wrote in 1983 in his book Enthusiasms, which he movingly dedicated to me even though we were no longer together: “What fear of revealing, of vulnerability, of being human, grips us so fiercely, and above all why? What is it that, down there in the darkness of the psyche, cries its silent No to the longing for Yes?”

It was a No that often coincided with retreating into depression — the “black dog” that he described as “that dark lair where the sick soul’s desire for solitude turns into misanthropy”.

No wonder he loved cats so much. “Above all,” he wrote once, “I love the detachment of cats, their willingness to be loved but not to respond beyond a certain, very clearly defined point; no cat ever gave its entire heart to any human being.”

And no wonder I decided to move not just cities, but continents. Our lives in London were so inextricably intertwined that in December 1980 I left for America.

A QUARTER of a century later I can still feel how tough and painful that decision was. He wasn’t just the big love of my life, he was a mentor as a writer and a role model as a thinker.

My biography of Maria Callas, published in 1980, is dedicated to him: “Without his unfailing support and understanding,” I wrote in the acknowledgments, “and without the long hours he spent reading, criticising and improving, I wondered sometimes whether there would be a book at all.”

Breakfast in his kitchen in the flat he rented in Devonshire Place was a liberal education. Every single morning newspaper and all the weeklies were spread on the kitchen table, with Bernard lapsing into rage, disgust, amazement or amusement, all volubly shared with me. The only response to the morning news that he never felt was detachment.

Even though he was no longer a theatre critic, many Saturdays were spent seeing two or sometimes three plays, starting off out of the West End. (I have just realised that I never saw a movie with him.) And of course anything that he loved, he wrote about — whether it was a new play (especially a new Tom Stoppard play), or lobster, or Kiri Te Kanawa, or Glyndebourne, or Solzhenitsyn. I remember really disliking his columns about food. It was one of our few arguments, because on personal matters his mode was not to argue but to withdraw.