Example sentences of "[noun] had [adv] be [art] [adj] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | The marriage to Earl Spencer had not been a happy one . |
| 2 | Spencer had always been the favoured one , beloved by mother since his difficult birth made it impossible for her to have any more children . |
| 3 | Todger had never been the same since they got to Hambury . |
| 4 | David had always been a great fashion person as well . |
| 5 | Lucy had n't been a hundred per cent sure with Charlie , but here she felt certain . |
| 6 | Telephoning Jonathan to break off the engagement had almost been a high point of comic relief . |
| 7 | Fishing had always been a major industry . |
| 8 | Caldas had once been a favourite family haunt , she recalled wistfully , and had the local bus service not meandered into every far-flung hamlet on its way and taken forever to make the journey she would have been back long ago . |
| 9 | The divide between theory and empirical data had long been a recurrent and problematic one for the social sciences , not least within sociology . |
| 10 | The first sessions had obviously been a useful learning experience for all concerned . |
| 11 | An unspoken reason for her attempted escape had also been the growing certainty that this attraction was coming to a head . |
| 12 | And it had been little comfort to realise — since he clearly could n't be bothered to even make the effort to get in touch with her — that her marriage had obviously been a disastrous mistake from the very beginning . |
| 13 | Ibrox had not been a Glaswegian one-night stand . |
| 14 | The social life is an important facet of university education , and Eva had always been a sociable person . |
| 15 | Poor folk had long been the chief sufferers from the raids of the body-snatchers , because of the flimsy coffins and shallow graves to which their corpses were consigned . |
| 16 | During the long post-war boom , argues Aglietta , such flexibility had not been an important regulating mechanism . |
| 17 | The situation was different , because the Conservatives had then been the largest party , whereas they were now 26 seats behind the Labour Party . |
| 18 | Sport had always been a prominent source of news in its own right . |
| 19 | In the printing trade , mobility had long been a traditional element in the organization of mutual support . |
| 20 | British Merseybeat had always been a no-go era . |
| 21 | James Clappison , Yorkshire South , said Mr Heath 's intervention in the campaign had not been a conspicuous success . |
| 22 | Its move from Maddox Street to Hanover Square had not been a happy one . |
| 23 | As a result , Earl Robert had not been the only valuable prisoner taken , a fact that obviously rankled with Matilda . |
| 24 | Robert had never been a healthy man and found it difficult to earn a living . |
| 25 | My first experience of airsports had n't been a good one . |
| 26 | By 1857 when Agassiz 's Essay on Classification appeared , as an introduction to a never-completed work on the natural history of the USA , it was already difficult to believe that Noah 's flood had really been a world-wide catastrophe with animals surviving two by two ; indeed Agassiz 's work on ice ages had involved reinterpretation of data that seemed evidence of the Flood . |
| 27 | If the pain which he had whenever he had anything the matter with his finger had always been a throbbing pain , and the pain caused by anything the matter with any other part of his body had never been a throbbing pain , then now , on experiencing a throbbing pain , he would naturally associate it with his finger . |
| 28 | To this end , schools were set up for peasant women and for prostitutes , who were numerous since Havana had previously been a notorious entertainment centre for North Americans , to give them an education and to provide them with some skills and training ready for the job market . |
| 29 | Of course , Jessamy 's arrival on the scene as Julius 's fiancée had obviously been a major crisis . |
| 30 | Some thought the scandal might have done better , in terms of audience ratings , if the name had not been the leaden ‘ Iran-contra affair ’ but something with panache , cloak-and-dagger stuff . |