It has become something of a cliche to compare modern photographic compositions to Renaissance paintings, but that is what I thought of when I saw the image of the baby boy born on a crowded small boat that was rescued off the coast of Lanzarote this week. Granted, Renaissance painters were notoriously bad at babies, and with his wrinkled little face and his full head of hair, this baby is as real as it gets. But composition-wise, there is something in the twist of the torsos of all those exhausted people turning towards him and his mother, the arms outstretched, hands reaching. For a photo not taken by a professional, the effect is startling.

What had this new mother just gone through? To be in early labour in such circumstances, let alone the later stages, let alone delivery … once again, I’m left astonished by the sheer physical and emotional endurance of women.

Most moving of all, though, was the way the child’s arrival was reported. Domingo Trujillo, the captain of the Talía search and rescue vessel, told how: “I covered him up, took him here [to my chest] and patted him so that he would stop crying,” while the helicopter pilot, Álvaro Serrano Pérez, said: “It being Three Kings Day, this was the best gift we could have received.” The tone of the discourse around migration is now so poisonous that to hear an infant born to a........

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