Example sentences of "he had been " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | In November 1990 he had been arrested in connection with a protest by women in Riyadh against a ban on women drivers . |
| 2 | The letter-writer is an orthopaedic surgeon who was taken off a plane as he was about to make a short visit to the UK where he had been a post-graduate student . |
| 3 | There are numerous examples of the poor quality of court-appointed lawyers ; John Young went to his death even though his trial lawyer had signed an affidavit admitting he had been ill-prepared at trial due to drug use , the recent break-up of his marriage and the discovery of his own homosexuality ; another attorney had his breath checked by the judge for signs of alcohol , another was found to be in contempt of court after arriving back from lunch drunk … and so I could go on . |
| 4 | Walter Pater was a master of atmosphere ; he had been inspired as a young man by Ruskin , and his idealism about art and his fine prose were in turn much admired by a younger generation of aesthetes , among whom Oscar Wilde was a prominent figure . |
| 5 | Even young Mr Yardley had to be a possibility , if Mrs Doran was right and he had been ‘ hanging around ’ the tent instead of pursuing job opportunities in Burford . |
| 6 | ‘ Even if he had been out shooting , he would n't slip into a lady 's bedroom in muddy hunting boots . ’ |
| 7 | He was very pragmatic about why he had been drawn to cinema ‘ I came into films not because I wanted to make films . |
| 8 | The affair lasted about three weeks then he broke it off and confessed to Sarah that he had been seeing someone else . |
| 9 | I have been following with interest the Gardeners ' World programmes where Nigel Colborn had been designing a new garden , especially when he had been using plants for the shady corner . |
| 10 | Like many graduates stimulated by their experiences , he discovered that although he had been of sufficient calibre to acquire the offer of the scholarship in the first place , he now faced the inevitable service obsession with a rejection of academic prowess in preference for ‘ practical skills in the real world ’ ( ibid. 157 ) : |
| 11 | ‘ He had been very good while I was pregnant . |
| 12 | Young Donald — his eyes were clear black-brown , like a lochan stained with peat , his hair was curly like a bull 's poll , and he had been a lovely lad until his father went away , clever with his hands , whittling pieces of wood and glueing them to make little windmills and watermills . |
| 13 | He had been pestering him for a while for stories about the grandparents he had never known . |
| 14 | The Reverend Archibald Menzies , minister to the stony and muddy village of Dull , was not exactly the pride of his parishioners — he had little chance of being that , since he had been chosen by the laird , not elected by the people . |
| 15 | He used the complete gamut of his voice , from a growl like a dog warning its master that it has a sore foot to a high , exalted monotone which he kept for perorations ; and when he was using the words of an Old Testament lament , Isaiah or Zephaniah , to make a piteous effect , he had been known to put his head back and yowl like a tom-cat . |
| 16 | He sighed tiredly , as though he had been working for a full day with stone and timber , and tried to listen to James Menzies , who was well away , drinking whisky with Allan and simmering with the news from the west , where the lists had been torn down from the church doors at Fortingall and Kenmore , and from Blair Atholl : the Duke 's factor had had to meet a crowd of more than a thousand and the Duke had signed a paper swearing not to impose the Act . |
| 17 | Sir John Menzies had a recurrent dream , especially on the nights when his young wife would not have him in the bed beside her , or he had been drinking late , and he slept in the side bedroom , which was tall and narrow with two pistols perched on nails in the wall . |
| 18 | A thud of chopping — movement between the tree trunks — a labourer was coming towards him , one of the consignment of convicts he had ordered through a merchant in Bideford , he had his machete in his hand , he was not menacing , he held out his spare hand in a strange appeal , lifting his face , which was crossed by deep scars , wounds across his eyes had puckered them right in so that he moved like a blind sleeper , closer and closer — Sir John woke up sweating , surprised to find himself alone , and then remembered : he had been drinking with his cousin Alexander Menzies of Bolfracks , the last bottle must have sent him under . |
| 19 | He made himself wake finally and lay under the covers feeling weak and hot , as though he had been spending energy incessantly all night . |
| 20 | But surely , if he had been spying , he would have had to continue coming to all the meetings ? |
| 21 | Another was that he had been elected to the Students ' Council at his school , Westmount High , and to its Board of Publishers . |
| 22 | By the time they met , Leonard was indeed pushing hard at the doors of his own individuality — in one sense he had been doing that for years . |
| 23 | In other words , was there not a feeling that , first through illness and then through his premature demise , he had been supplanted in his rights ( through ‘ natural ’ causation , we emphasise ) , much as Jacob supplanted Esau 's rights so many centuries ago ( through devious schemes ) . |
| 24 | If no one was now ‘ claiming ’ anything from him ; if he had been marginalised , then ‘ he had no rights in the matter ’ any longer . |
| 25 | Here , on a small island of some 2,000 or so souls , pocketed by the encircling hills around its charming port , was the ideal place for him to gather his thoughts and address himself more seriously than he had been able to do in busy Montreal , grim London or frenetic New York . |
| 26 | Tonight he had been immersed in scenes of Mafia violence and found himself the next moment slumped in the Chesterfield staring at silver snow on the screen . |
| 27 | Nevertheless , they have demonstrated activity in the visual areas during an imaging task , in the language areas during a verbal task and even , on one - occasion , in the higher visual areas of a schizophrenic patient who subsequently reported that he had been hallucinating . |
| 28 | On the train as we rode past the spines of Manhattan to the flat rooftops of Brooklyn , he told me something of his travels in north America , indeed , he had been much further west than Jersey City , even beyond Chicago . |
| 29 | He told me how he had been deceived by a young man who claimed to be the son of a banker , and he had lost money in a gambling casino because he believed the con artist . |
| 30 | In one city he had been impersonated by a woman named Helen Potter , and in another a boy of sixteen managed to get into his hotel room . |