If there was one common link it was a preference for high octane hues.
"There was a preference for people who had been financial controllers or certified practising accountants," he says.
What they had in common, though, was a preference for living far from a damp, cloud-covered island where the place of women was clearly defined.
"We verified that there was a preference of some customers at the expense of others," William F. Galvin, the state's chief financial regulator, said in an interview.
He has said that he made the appointment simply to insure that Illinois was represented by two senators, and he told me, "There was a preference for an African-American for this seat".
On Thursday, one E.U. official said there was a preference for avoiding highly complex programs that used some of the financial engineering blamed for causing the crisis in 2008, in favor of a "plain vanilla" version.
There was a preference for "sense and sensibility", for Edward Waverley rejecting the wild passionate Flora for the prudent and irenic Rose in Walter Scott's novel.Faced with today's tide of fact-free politics, one can only long for balancers – German, French, Dutch, but especially British – to reappear on the European stage.
Tanner was careful not to endorse the idea that Pepys is "a mere literary performer", but he did describe the diary as "an indiscretion of his youth", and underlying his remarks was a preference for dwelling on the "great career" and an assumption - which others have shared - that official life and intimate experience are indeed far removed from one another.
The findings, also, revealed that there was a preference for gap-filling activities across writing sections.
But what hadn't changed was a preference for being alone rather than alone in a crowd.
As this was a preference study, selection bias is an obvious limitation to the interpretation of the results.
