the Hall of Mirrors: Reflections on organisations, academia and machinery judgement

Bill Jarrett has been called brilliant, and he has been called a disgrace-often in the same month, on the same evidence, and usually by people who had not troubled to look very hard. It has taken him most of a life to work out that the verdict was never really about him. It was about the machine handing it down. From the bottom stream of a schoolroom to a professor's chair-and out the other side-The Hall of Mirrors follows one ordinary, stubborn man through a world of false reflections: the ones that flatter, the ones that wound, and the ones we assemble, all by ourselves, out of fear and hope and the wish to be told we matter. Wry, unsparing, and quietly devastating, it is a novel about what organisations do with the sincerity of the people inside them and about the long, unfashionable work of learning to tell a true reflection from a false one, and to stop needing anyone else's.opinion.