The Hall of Mirrors: Reflections on organisations, academia and the machinery of judgement (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798187589456)

A comic novel about a lifetime of mixed messages - and learning, at last, to stop believing them.

At eleven, Bill Jarrett was told that he had failed the eleven-plus. On the same marks, the same morning, he was informed that he was he second cleverest child in the county. Both carried the same official stamp; both came in the same report; and he went up to bed not knowing which of them was him.

He would go on receiving that envelope for sixty years. From the bottom stream of a schoolroom to a professor's chair - by way of a corporate away-day at which he is handed a box of lolly sticks and invited to prove himself fit to lead - The Hall of Mirrors follows one stubborn, ordinary man through every institution that offered to tell him what he was worth, and generally told him two contradictory things at once. It ends, a lifetime later, with him being called a crackpot and a genius over the same piece of physics - which may, he would be the first to admit, be wrong.

Funny where you'd expect grief and tender where you'd expect neither, it is a novel about mixed messages - and about the late, unfashionable discovery that the only verdict finally worth trusting is the one you learn to hand down on yourself.