Donald Trump spoke for an hour and 28 minutes.

Donald Trump is getting old and his speeches go on and on in a way that reminds people of a certain age of Brezhnev or Ceausescu.

We saw this when DJT accepted the Republican nomination, at Davos and now with his 108 minute State of the Union speech, the longest in US history.

George Washington's first one had 1,089 words so took him around 8 minutes.

Mr Gladstone's speeches were long and held crowds of working men who stood to hear him riveted for hours, as he quoted Greek and Roman poets and Dryden.

His budget speech lasted four hours and 45 minutes in 1853.

Cicero would speak for two hours.

I remember passing Bertrand Russell's son, the fourth Earl Russell, each morning sleeping on the red leather benches of the House of Lords behind the throne when I made my way to my first job in the Victoria Tower, when my life was just beginning. He attended almost daily and often slept there but only once spoke in the House, an occasion on which he suggested inter alia that the peers leave London for the South Seas and take hallucinogenic drugs. The speech lasted for several hours till the Lords, which had in those days no speaker and no closure, finally got him to sit down by barracking.

This had been in the 1960s and the speech had been published by a hippy publishing house and enjoyed some success.