Conspiracy theories explain anomalous events as the outcome of secret plots by small groups of people with malevolent aims. Is every conspiracy unique, or do they all share a common thread? That is, might conspiracy explanations stem from a higher-order belief that binds together a wide variety of overtly independent phenomena under a common umbrella? We can call this belief the conspiracy frame. Network science allows us to examine this frame at two different levels: by examining the structural coherence of individual conspiracies and by examining the higher-level interconnectivity of the conspiracy beliefs as a whole.

This chapter concludes Part V by returning to the topic of Laudianism viewed not as a movement or an ideology but rather as a coalition, which status, when it was winning, gave it a flexibility that enabled it to attract the support of many people who were not themselves convicted Laudians. But when the Laudians’ star was no longer in the ascendant, that same coalition could easily unravel, as a variety of fellow travellers and fair-weather friends adjusted their positions to meet the changing circumstances.

In this chapter, we move on to describe and analyse the changing contours of race and the political in the second half of the twentieth century. We argue that rather than seeing the politics of race through the lens of the mainstream political sphere, we need to pay close attention to other spheres of politics, particularly in the alternative and transitional spheres that emerged over the past few decades to give voice to the mobilisations of black and minority communities. This in turn links up with the analysis in the substantive chapters of the book that are framed around the often messy and evolving connections between these spheres of political life and culture.

The fourth interlude, ‘Old Dog Tray’, discusses one of the ballad-singer’s last great mainstream hits, the sentimental American song ‘Old Dog Tray’. I regard this song as something of a paradox: both an ideal solo ballad, and an indication of the ballad-singer’s failings, considering the song’s harmonic possibilities as realised by performances on keyboard, barrel-organ, or by vocal ensembles – possibilities not available for songs written and sung in the early part of the century.

This chapter explores singers’ repertoires, from whence they were derived, and their networks of dissemination, and centres on my formulation of a cultural ‘mainstream’ of songs. I begin by placing the notoriously mixed repertoires available to us within a theoretical framework of the miscellaneous as a form of cultural consumption, before moving beyond specific lists of songs to a consideration of historical process. I examine the remarkable ways in which singers appropriated tunes from other cultural spaces, and the varying methods by which a lyric might be sourced. I look at the question of circulation both within and without London, and the movement of songs between different physical and social sites, demonstrating in particular the overwhelming musical importance of the theatre to mainstream song culture. I construct an image of this ‘mainstream’ as a working model for understanding how songs were produced, performed, and consumed in an age before sound recording: a model that necessarily takes issue with Peter Burke’s influential theory of the separation of elite and popular cultures by 1800. As the century progressed and harmonic forms of songwriting, informed by keyboards, came to prominence, this cultural model was no longer tenable, and newly-literate workers with a slightly improved disposable income began to consume songs in both physical and performative forms that bypassed the ballad-singer.