THE MAIL on Sunday, June 25, 2006, included a book review by Hugh Massingberd on
TITLE DEEDS: A WORK OF FRICTION by Liza Campbell (Doubleday $14.99)
Liza Campbell's late father was Hugh Campbell, the 6th Earl Cawdor and 25th Thane. In
1970 her father succeeded to Cawdor, an inheritance that she reveals overwhelmed Hugh
utterly from the start. (Cawdor Castle, Nairn, Scotland.)
In graphic detail, she tells of his legacy of misery and addiciton. She concludes
that her father was like a child in adoring the luxuries Cawdor gave him, but loathing the
burden of being the Thane.
According to Massingberd,
Campbell mused that her father might even be doing his elder son a favour by bequeathing
the castle to his second wife - the story's dramatic denouement, likened by the
author to a 'dirty bomb, timed to detonate only after his death' and that he might
have found it hard to imagine that his son would be able to cope with the respondibilities
Cawdor entailed.
Messingberd found Liza Campbell to be an exceptional writer like her father whose
guidebook to Cawdor Castle was far and away the most incisive and entertaining exercise of
the hundreds in that dismally dull genre.