Example sentences of "[pron] had been an [adj] [noun sg] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | By the time I left his office , I felt as if I had been an established outside-left for years , ’ Bastin later recalled . |
| 2 | ‘ I had never been interviewed before but felt really at ease , mainly because I discovered I had been an informal link worker all my life ! |
| 3 | ’ So this particular sergeant who had been a PC when I had been an acting sergeant , sat alongside me . |
| 4 | My personal life had been a disaster : I had had a lousy relationship with my mother ; been frightened of my father ; from time to time my marriage had been close to the rocks and I had been an uncaring father . |
| 5 | This implied the eventual disbanding of the rural ‘ communes ’ which had been an essential part of Mao s agricultural policy . |
| 6 | Dana did n't come to the showroom either ; she had appeared for a fitting and for a rehearsal , as she had promised , neither of which had been an outstanding success . |
| 7 | The " sett " referred to as being held by Wilson might have been what we now know as the Tilberthwaite Mine ; which had been an attractive prospect from the days of the Elizabethan miners and continued to be investigated on and off right up to the 1930's . |
| 8 | He himself had been an American citizen for twenty-eight years when he replied otherwise to the adjutant 's inquiry . |
| 9 | If she had been an ordinary teacher , trying to teach an ordinary sedentary subject like history or Latin , she would have been mercilessly flouted and mocked , but as it was she managed to get by . |
| 10 | It turned out that she and her husband were experts on reincarnation and ran a sort of reincarnation centre in Switzerland and she had been an Egyptian princess — before , you know — and written books about it . |
| 11 | I was already aware at the age of eleven of my mother 's political background : she had been an active Communist until 1965 . |
| 12 | Stanley Steward , its first chairman — who had been an electrical manufacturer in the private sector — mobilised considerable pressure from the ‘ county ’ set on his consumer Consultative Council , and lobbied both the Government and the Central Authority for a subvention . |
| 13 | As befitted a man who had been an assistant professional in his youth he had great sympathy for those afflicted by golf mania . |
| 14 | He had also asked Henry Victor Dyson , a lecturer at Reading University who had been an exact contemporary of Tolkien 's as an undergraduate at Exeter College . |
| 15 | The row erupted after Clinton denounced the remarks of a black rap singer , Sister Souljah , who had been an earlier guest of the Rainbow Coalition . |
| 16 | IT is sad that a pub should turn you away simply for the kind of fashion you decide to adopt , particularly since you had been an accepted customer for some years . |
| 17 | If you had been an out-of-work farm hand near Inverness , or near Dumfries , why might you have been one of many who moved to Glasgow in the last century ? |
| 18 | Since publication last year of the Pwllheli Tourism Action Plan , said Mr Lewis , there had been an increased level of activity in the implementation of the LEAD Initiative , launched by the Wales Tourist Board in 1989 . |
| 19 | On Tuesday night , the company held back from issuing dismissal notices until after yesterday 's meeting , but Mr McLevy said there had been an overwhelming vote , with only four against , to reject the Timex proposals . |
| 20 | There had been an almighty family row a fortnight before : Tristram had remarked that she was overworked and that they could easily afford a servant , and Harry had taken exception to the suggestion . |
| 21 | The Agence France-Presse ( AFP ) news agency reported from Kinshasa on Jan. 7 that there had been an abortive coup attempt the previous month , as a result of which a number of high-ranking officers were said to have been imprisoned . |
| 22 | News reports in December indicating that there had been an attempted coup were subsequently dismissed by Jawara as groundless rumours . |
| 23 | In his first , Lucky Jim , there had been an offensive character called Bertrand , a painter and a pacifist who preferred his name to be pronounced in the French manner : clearly a late derivative of Bloomsbury and a poseur of the worst water ; and even if he were not a rival-in-love of the hero , that ( one feels ) would be all that needed to be said about him . |
| 24 | Local elections held on May 27 were Poland 's first completely free multiparty elections since before the Second World War ( in the parliamentary elections of June 1989 there had been an agreed distribution of seats in the Sejm ( the lower house of the National Assembly ) among the former ruling parties and opposition or independent candidates — see pp. 36722-24 , and some opposition groups had been denied registration to compete as parties ) . |
| 25 | Finally , beginning with the resolution of the Saar issue , there had been an increasing rapprochement between France and West Germany . |
| 26 | Police at Antrim Road RUC station said there had been an increasing number of break-ins in the Oldpark and Cliftonville districts . |
| 27 | It was clear that there had been an implicit agreement to hold back output until a higher price was fixed . |
| 28 | Although there had been an appreciable rise in incomes , supplies in the state shops continued to be poor , encouraging a growing black market [ for clampdown in August against black marketeers see p. 37665 ] . |
| 29 | Perhaps the development of most interest to us in 1854 was that on an American initiative there had been an international conference at Brussels on shortening ship 's passages by producing better charts of winds and currents . |
| 30 | Mainly under the influence of Pietro Bembo , the codifier of the Tuscan speech as the literary language of Italy in his Prose della Volgar Lingua ( 1525 ) , there had been an extraordinary revival of interest in Petrarch and the patrons of the frottola-composers , such as the Mantuan Duchess Isabella d'Este , asked them for settings of Petrarch 's sonnets and strophic canzoni . |