Audiobook of the week: The Last Fighting Tommy by Harry Patch, with Richard van Emden, Read by Alan Howard

Harry Patch hates Remembrance Sunday: it's "just show-business". To him, 22 September is the important date, for on that day in 1917 he was seriously wounded and, to his abiding grief, his closest friends were killed. Now 110, he is amazed to find himself the last surviving soldier to have fought in the trenches.

He grew up in Somerset, would like to say he remembered the death of Queen Victoria or the sinking of the Titanic but can't recall either. Like Sassoon in Kent, he enjoyed the carefree pleasures of youth. He scrumped apples, explored old tin mines, generally larked about. A reluctant conscript, he was called up in time for Passchendaele, joining a Lewis gun team. His memories of that time are detailed and shockingly immediate, refined now into an intense detestation of war, which he calls "the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings".

That fine actor Alan Howard captures his West Country lilt and thoughtful delivery to perfection – as we realise at the end, when Patch himself is heard, describing the four seconds in which a German soldier was running at him with fixed bayonet. He chose not to end the man's life, but to shoot him in the leg: he'd promised to serve King and country, not to kill people.