The Oxford Times lost one of its finest and most versatile writers with the death this week of Jeannine Alton. In hospital for investigation of a brain tumour, she suffered a serious haemorrhage from which she died on Tuesday morning. She leaves two sons, six grandchildren and a legion of friends, each of whom will have special memories of a remarkable woman none can have felt other than privileged to have known.

My own friendship with Jeannine began as a consequence of taking charge of this newspaper's arts pages in 1994. She was one of a number of freelance reviewers I inherited from my predecessor as arts editor, Tony Augarde. Most of them were only names to me - indeed, some years earlier they had been only initials, since these were what the sub-editors appended to reviews in those days as the writer's byline. Having 'cold called' Jeannine a time or two, soliciting her help in covering various concerts, art exhibitions and plays, there came a time when - in her view at least - I was not being sufficiently demanding of her services.

The reminder that "it was time that young man put a bit more work my way" came from an unlikely source. A doctor friend of mine encountered her at a lunch party at the home of Canon John Kelly, the former Principal of St Edmund Hall. Hearing of her contributions to The Oxford Times, Peter mentioned my name. She seized her opportunity. The aforementioned message was on its way to me before the day was out. Needless to say - since Jeannine always managed to appear bossy without actually being so - the instruction was quickly acted upon.

Once we started to meet more regularly, friendship deepened. This was a process assisted in part by something of a 'back story', again involving Teddy Hall. Jeannine's late husband Reggie, who studied there immediately after the war, later went on to become its bursar and lecturer in English. It was not long into our acquaintance, during the interval on one of our play reviewing trips at which partners were present, that we realised Rosemarie's father, Cliff, had been a student contemporary at the college. Reggie could recall seeing him play hockey. A mutual respect appeared to have existed in those days between two men who had served their country well in war - Reggie in the army (he was awarded the MC), Cliff flying Swordfish with the Fleet Air Arm.

The old times - including her own student days at Lady Margaret Hall - were not, as it happened, a topic that Jeannine was especially keen to dwell on. Though already a septuagenarian when I got to know her, her eye was always on the future, on the next new thing. Her enthusiasms as a reviewer reflected this. In the area of music, for example, she was wearily dismissive of the baroque favourites that were for so long considered safe programming in Oxford. If there was something more wackily modern on the way - a new Jonathan Dove or Harrison Birtwistle opera, for example - then she was at the head of the queue eager for the task of reviewing. She gained a particular satisfaction in spotting a major new talent before anyone else did. One such was the celebrated tenor Ian Bostridge, whom she heard singing during his days as an Oxford student.

Her dedication to the task was evident in the way she always 'did her homework'. If we were off to Stratford to see some rarely performed play - as during the RSC's recent Spanish Golden Age season, for example - she would have sought out, perhaps with some difficulty, a copy of the text and read it thoroughly in the run-up to the trip. Even with much better-known plays, there would have been a read-through to familiarise herself with the characters and plot.

Her enjoyment in writing for The Oxford Times was stressed by her elder son Roger in a telephone conversation I had with him following her death. "She loved it," he said, "especially when it came to meeting deadlines. In that respect she was always much more professional than me." (That is a statement of some significance coming from a man who has been editor of The Observer for the past ten years - and a senior figure on The Guardian for a quarter of a century before that.) Jeannine's speed and skill as a writer never failed to amaze me. There were occasions when I dropped her off well after midnight at her North Oxford home, and arrived at my desk the next morning to find her 500-word review already on my computer 'ready to go'. There would perhaps be 1,000 words, too, on one of her 'awaydays' in London, during which she would have taken in three, sometimes four, art exhibitions. Always eloquent and pithily expressed, her reviews rarely needed to be altered. When changes were made, these usually involved the removal of some hip modern expression she had picked up. These often proved incomprehensible to the man she always called "Boss" and therefore, I assumed, to most of our readers.

On two matters - and these only peripherally to do with work - we were never going to agree. One was over the warm admiration she had for Margaret Thatcher and the anger she felt towards the Oxford academic establishment that denied her an honorary degree. (She was also very pro the Prince of Wales, another unfairly maligned figure, in her view. Having once marked one of his Cambridge examination papers, she considered him much more intelligent than was generally thought.) Our second area of disagreement concerned speed. She was very fond of it; I not. On our drives together, I could tell that she always thought me boringly over-cautious as I religiously obeyed every restriction imposed. This always made me very glad that I had never been a passenger in her car.