Every Monday (well, most of them) we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers. This week’s choice is from 2015.

We’re always flattered when readers tell us that Alex provides a realistic depiction of the financial world. People sometimes even assume that one, or both, of us must have worked in the City of London. The truth is that neither of us has ever had a proper job in our lives. If we get technical details right in the cartoon, it’s thanks to the quality of our City moles and Russell’s ability to decipher the shaky handwriting in his notebook after long boozy lunches with them over which the beans were spilled.

Sometimes, though, we stray from the strict reality brief, and we’re pleased that one of our readers has picked this slightly anachronistic cartoon as this week’s choice. The last actual duel between gentlemen over a matter of honour in London was fought in the 1840s, but the Alex cartoon has featured two duels over the years. The first one was in 1992 when Alex was having an affair with his Essex-girl secretary Wendy and was challenged by her boyfriend Wayne to give him satisfaction. They duly met on Hampstead Heath at dawn, with Alex emerging victorious. Wayne was given the choice of weapons, but was let down by his fencing skills - as a handler of stolen goods, he should have realised that the antique duelling pistols he had acquired were merely ornamental firelighters.

Then in December 2015 Clive and his boss Cyrus resorted to pistols at dawn after Clive came home from a business trip to find Cyrus in bed with his wife Bridget. Clive thought he had shot his adversary dead, but it turned out that Cyrus was secretly wearing a bullet-proof vest, which is just the sort of caddish behaviour that one would expect from an American.

The pun in this cartoon (it’s one of Charles’s - puns in the strip frequently are) is more than just a play on words. The switch in meaning in frame four conjures up a vivid image of Clive as an extremely earnest child. The idea that his school should have had a prize for the most boring pupil is perhaps not so fanciful: public schools are known for their sadism. A traumatic childhood experience like this might explain Clive’s lack of self-esteem in later life, which persisted even after he rose to become a senior banker.

We’re not sure why we decided that Cyrus should hail from Idaho. It’s a unremarkable, staunchly Republican, redneck state, whose most famous export is the potato. Russell always liked the character Duncan Idaho from “Dune”, so perhaps that’s where the idea came from, or maybe we just thought the name was funny. Idaho was apparently a completely made-up word, invented in 1860 by a political lobbyist who falsely claimed it came from the Shoshone Native American language. It seems appropriate that Cyrus might have such a bogus heritage.

Nerdy pub quiz fact. Duncan Idaho is the only character who appears in all six of the original Frank Herbert “Dune” novels.

If you’ve got any suggestions for a favourite cartoon for future inclusion please email us. And do tell us if there’s a particular reason why it appealed to you.