Crisis, like war, brings out the best and the worst in us. But it does so almost randomly. The “flood” of refugees landing on pristine European shores inflamed the self-centred and insular, the Fascist and racist seeds in a damaged culture. But national reactions were surprising. Who would have expected heartlessness from the Hungarians or such compassion from the Germans? It seemed an unexpectedly healing moment to see the desperate Syrians packed on to German trains – with their dark associations with the Holocaust – being welcomed by kind hosts. Crisis shows us up in our true colours, sometimes embarrassingly. English politicians dithered and waffled – the usual calculated smokescreen for avoiding hard truth. What emerges in crisis too is the symbolic impo