SOURCE: Moore, Charlotte. “In Their Own Words.” Spectator 290, no. 9095 (30 November 2002): 54.

In the following review, Moore offers a positive assessment of Rory & Ita and compliments Doyle's efforts in compiling the biography.

My first memory is of the stone floor. Stone slabs. And I remember … soldiers marching, with their leggings and boots, and dragging cannon guns with mules, and the noise and the screeching and the roars of the men. And another memory is of my Grandfather Mullally eating griddle cake in our house in Terenure, and drinking his tea out of a saucer.

Either you like this kind of thing or you don't. I love it. I relished every word of Rory & Ita. The book is described as Roddy Doyle's biography of his parents, but Doyle is little more than a judicious editor of Rory and Ita Doyle's own words.

The result is a study in ordinariness. The Doyles...