For some, the fox is a beautiful, intelligent creature; for others, a ravager of henhouses. Lucy Jones probes these conflicted attitudes, and examines her own family history of foxhunting. She investigates the animal’s behaviour and reputation for cunning, charts attempts to exterminate it from the Tudor ‘Vermin Acts’ onwards, and traces the fox through folklore and literature from Aesop’s fables to Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox.