The article focuses on defining the parameters of stylistic variation in biographical texts dedicated to politicians, using the material of a number of highly acclaimed biographies of Sir Winston Spencer Churchill. The study considers different linguistic levels, analyzing the functioning of nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and syntactic constructions – in relation to the type of content they serve to convey (emotional / non-emotional, specialized / non-specialized). As a result, the analysis shows that the emotional and expressive qualities of such texts are inversely proportional to the amount of explicit facts they contain, i.e. the more informative and logically structured a biographical text is the less the author tends to be emotionally involved in the account of events, and vice versa. Biographies are used in teaching a wide range of subjects, thus representing a universal type of material that can be valuable in a TESL classroom. The benefits of this study bear relevance to writing strategies and tactics for professional journalists, writers, politicians, economists, historians and other experts interested in biographical texts.