BOOKS: 300 Years of Carnival ; Previous Anthologies Have Written Black and Asian Writers out of London's Literary History. So David Dabydeen Is Delighted with a Volume That Shows the Capital in Its True Colours

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London Calling

Sukhdev Sandhu

HarperCollins

pounds 20, 498pp

pounds 18 (plus pounds 1.99 p&p per order) from 0870 8001122

IN 1993, A N Wilson edited the Faber Book of London which, like literary anthologies before, contained not a single passage from a black or Asian writer. Historians, anthropologists and linguists routinely write about London as a mishmash of cultures and ethnicities, or as a sprawl of languages and accents, each century shuffling in newcomers - Romans, Saxons, Huguenots, Jews, Ugandan Asians, West Indians. All the more strange, then, that the voices of blacks and Asians could be so rarely heard in …