A few minutes later, he offered advice to the younger people in the room, which was pretty much all of them. “I just warn you all, never make one great eulogy,” he counselled, “because you get asked to do everybody’s eulogy.”

This was the loquacious Joe Biden that many in Washington remember from his years before the White House, before he learned to check himself a little more in public and stopped giving so many interviews and news conferences where he might go off script. Biden has always had a mind that wandered and a tongue that was loose, often to the chagrin of his advisers.

His off-duty passions fairly leap off the 258 pages of transcript – particularly real estate and automotive vehicles.

“I’m a frustrated architect,” Biden said, constantly thinking about how to build or redesign homes. His family even gave him a drafting board. “In order to try to convince me not to run for the Senate for the 19th time,” he related, “my wife said, ‘Look, you don’t run, I’ll pay for architectural school for you’.”

She had her limits, though. When he mulled adding a swimming pool to a house in Virginia where they moved after leaving the vice president’s residence, she drew a red line of her own: “Jill’s going: ‘What are you doing? What are you talking about? Stop.’”

Biden’s devotion to home design was nonetheless evident. He corrected prosecutors who referred to his house in Wilmington, Delaware, as “the lake house,” saying, “It’s no lake, it’s a pond”. And while he might have forgotten names or dates, he exhibited perfect recall about the layout of his homes, leading a verbal expedition through them for the benefit of Hur, who noted that the president appeared “to have a photographic understanding and recall of the house”.

Then there was his cherished Corvette, which Biden always speaks of as if it were a favourite child. “It drove me crazy. I wanted to drive it,” he said, referring to limits imposed by the Secret Service, which frowns on presidents and vice presidents taking the wheel.

“The worst part was they said I couldn’t drive it outside the driveway. It’s a long driveway. So I’d get to the bottom of the driveway, tack it up to about four grand [4000 rpm].” At that point, the transcript notes, the president of the United States “makes a car sound”.

He started talking about “a big 4x4,” probably a Ford Bronco. “Zero to 60 [100km/h] in 4.6,” he exclaimed.

“That’s fast,” Hur agreed, indulgently.

“Yeah,” Biden said. “By the way, you know how it works? It’s really cool.”

“Sir,” Hur tried to interject, “I’d love – I would love, love to hear much more about this, but I do have a few more questions to get through.”

Biden ignored him. “You can take 30 seconds,” he said, “but you put your foot on the brake, you hit, you hit a button that’s in the – it says ‘launch’. You step your foot on the accelerator all the way down.”

He told well-worn stories of deciding to run for president in 2020 – how a dying Beau Biden, his eldest son, insisted that he not withdraw from public life out of grief, how he bristled when former president Donald Trump equated white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, with the protesters against them and how his grandchildren called a family meeting to urge him to get into the race.

Some of the more interesting stories, though, were of his early adulthood, now more than a half-century ago. He “didn’t take law school very seriously,” he admitted, but once gave a 10-minute talk in class without reading the material and “the whole class stood up, started clapping”. He wanted to move to Idaho after law school but went to a job interview at a law firm in Delaware where he was told, “I assume you’re expecting to be hired on your looks”.

And then there was the man with the mutilated private parts. It was one of Biden’s first cases as a lawyer, involving an oil refinery worker who was injured by a fire in a containment vessel. “He lost part of his penis and one of his testicles and he was 23 years old,” the president explained matter of factly.

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A senior partner ordered him to write a motion to dismiss the man’s lawsuit. “And son of a bitch, it prevailed,” Biden recounted. “And I looked over at that kid and his wife home with two little kids, and I thought: ‘Son of a bitch, I’m in the wrong business. I’m not made for this’.”