Example sentences of "[pron] [modal v] have been [art] [adj] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | The press release the editors sent me was acceptable , but I may have been the only person to get it . |
| 2 | This Melanie of his must have been a right madam , thought Leonora when Penry went off to get himself a glass of whisky . |
| 3 | I sent the cheque back , saying that although it had been immensely good of them to bring me up , I must have been a great burden and was now a disappointment , so I would prefer them to keep this money as some repayment for all they had done . |
| 4 | ‘ For once , not Rosemary , though I 'm getting more and more desperate about not knowing what to do for the best , ’ he confessed , but went on to explain , ‘ I spent a lot of time yesterday in realising that I must have been a real wet blanket when Naylor announced your engagement on Saturday . ’ |
| 5 | I must have been a constant reminder of her , and he could n't bear it . ’ |
| 6 | I must have been the greatest bore ever , and it 's a wonder that those I inflicted my views upon did n't rebel . |
| 7 | If I found there was no coffee in the house I 'd shout and swear at her and I must have been an absolute pain to live with . |
| 8 | ‘ Do n't think you 've heard the last of this matter , ’ he said through his teeth , ‘ you wo n't get away with it , taking from me my home and my birthright , I should have been the eldest son , I am more worthy of the position . |
| 9 | In the circumstances I should have been the good daughter , studious and uninterested in boyfriends . |
| 10 | ‘ I could have been the only Irishman to play for both Billy Bingham and Jack Charlton , ’ he said . |
| 11 | I mean that does have a lot of resonance for all of us. feel that erm I could have been the same person erm with lots of different changes to my body . |
| 12 | I 'd have been the proudest father in the history of the game . ’ |
| 13 | I would have been a progressive teacher 's ideal pupil . |
| 14 | ‘ Kenneth and I would have been a marvellous companionship , but … ’ |
| 15 | I would have been a better person than I am today . |
| 16 | I would have been a foolish man to do otherwise . |
| 17 | If I had put a tea cosy on my head I would have been a dead ringer for Mrs Pankhurst , but it affected my behaviour even more than my looks . |
| 18 | What 's more , I would have been the first to complain . |
| 19 | I would have been the first to know . ’ |
| 20 | Perhaps if I had n't been a fool I would have been the dead girl in the road . ’ |
| 21 | The easy , informed arguments they had about the Kesselring case proved him wrong : as they talked , the two of them might have been no more than friendly colleagues . |
| 22 | It is another which may have been a christianised pagan ritual , evolved from dancing round a sacred site or stone on which a church was eventually built . |
| 23 | There was a port called Minoa on the south-west coast of Sicily which may have been a Crete-controlled trading station . |
| 24 | When interest group activity is added to electoral pressure , the ‘ shame ’ attached to being held responsible for social dissensus , lead to changes which may have been a voluntary response or have been supervised by a state responding to legitimate protest . |
| 25 | The generation of numbers was regarded by the early Pythagoreans as an actual physical operation occurring in space and time , and the basic cosmogonical process was identified with the generation of numbers from the initial unit , the Monad , which may have been a sophisticated version of the earlier Orphic idea of the primeval World-egg . |
| 26 | Offa 's victory over Cynewulf in 779 , therefore , would seem to have been a signal for intensified Mercian activity on Offa 's southern border which may have been an essential prerequisite to any sustained involvement in the south-east . |
| 27 | A further explanation could be that rats have a small ductular component of bile secretion which may have been the primary target of the observed response , as evidenced by the increase in biliary bicarbonate output observed in the canine studies . |
| 28 | But when I later tried to find my way back to the dining-room to finish my meal , which should have been a simple thing to do , I just could not locate it at all . |
| 29 | I felt the most awful failure , and thought that perhaps if we could try again — since the thing was done , the point of no return passed — we might arrange things better , somehow recapture the basis of feeling we had had , which should have been a perfect foundation for a love-affair , but which we had somehow bungled and thrown away . |
| 30 | Two seconds , one of which should have been a first . |