Example sentences of "[was/were] [verb] itself [prep] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | If the bird were dashing itself against the bars , feathers flying , then the similarities to human suffering would arouse impulses to assist , even to release it , like the giraffe . |
| 2 | In the ornate new council chamber , Mayor Murphy was trying to convince the city council that to be a real Edwardian Mayor he ought to wear mayoral robes , as they did in England ; the newly extended hospital was bracing itself for additional accident cases ; and Hank Stych stood in the airport at Calgary waiting for a local plane to take him north to Tollemarche . |
| 3 | The city was bracing itself for a party to beat them all , but the Spaniards decided to re-write the script . |
| 4 | Milton had no intention of sharing the unpopularity which was attaching itself to Sir James and promptly referred the matter to the Solicitor-General for action , but the end result , as Mrs. Campbell pointed out , was that ‘ our Member has lost his interest in this parish and really by most of our friends in the shire ’ . |
| 5 | The incident precipitated three days of violence and looting that tarnished Miami 's reputation at a time when the city was preening itself for one of America 's premier sporting events , the Super Bowl . |
| 6 | Britain was proving itself to be better than the ungovernable ‘ banana republic ’ of hostile critics in 1975–6 , but still an ailing ex-imperial giant lacking focus and perhaps even faith . |
| 7 | As far as the programme itself was concerned , she felt it was a ‘ classic example of the way in which the BBC , with its penchant for ‘ South Bank ’ religion was allowing itself to be used as a launching platform for the ‘ new morality ’ ’ . |
| 8 | If so , it would be wrong that the council , because it has performed its statutory duty under the national law to enforce section 47 , was to find itself under a liability in damages as a result of performing that duty . |
| 9 | When Alsace was rebuilding itself as part of France after the war , it decided to create a single appellation and to use grape variety names rather than vineyard sites . |
| 10 | Interestingly enough Larry Witty , the General Secretary of the Labour Party , said at last year 's Labour Party Conference that if it had not been for the steadily , steady influence of the unions during the eighties , when the Party was tearing itself in two , we would not have a Labour Party today . |
| 11 | He raised his wings and pulled them back a little , bent his head forward , slightly opened his beak , and lunged forward and down at the white flesh of the hand that was pushing itself with a piece of sandwich through the front bars of his cage . |
| 12 | Those first six dancers had come to celebrate the newly awakened school of English classical dance that was establishing itself with the coming of peace . |
| 13 | The third case resulted from the willingness and need of the firm to take work from any source while it was establishing itself in a new market . |
| 14 | As he reached the middle of the trough , the water was forcing itself over his shoulders . |
| 15 | Perhaps the most obvious illustration of the extent to which trade was forcing itself upon the often unwilling attention of traditional diplomacy was the creation of a new type of diplomat most clearly typified by the commercial attaché . |
| 16 | Security officials feared that it was re-establishing itself in the region , possibly with the help of the small Catalan secessionist group Terra Lliure . |
| 17 | Thus developed in Lebanon a pattern of events which was to recreate itself in increasingly savage form over the coming years . |
| 18 | Her voice faded as her body weakened and drooped , so that she seemed no more than the shadow of the eagle she must once have been , and a shadow that was losing itself in the darkness of a cage . |
| 19 | Yet many party supporters were outraged by this betrayal of the Whig tradition , and the very fact that the issue of liberty of conscience could now be given a low priority in the party agenda is perhaps indicative of the beginnings of the process whereby Whiggery was to divorce itself from the cause of Dissent . |
| 20 | His objection was that these poetic celebrations of the coarse side of army life were an offence against English traditions of Christian civilisation , forming part of a larger ‘ back wave ’ which was manifesting itself in various ways : ‘ the Hooligan in Politics , in Literature , and Journalism ’ , ‘ the Hooligan spirit of patriotism ’ , and all the other barbaric symptoms of ‘ the restless and uninstructed Hooliganism of the time ’ above which ‘ the flag of a Hooligan Imperialism is raised ’ . |
| 21 | The first creature we had seen , a small turtle , was sunning itself on a rock as we climbed into a canoe and paddled and drifted round the green-speared edge of the lake . |
| 22 | It was sunning itself on the path . |
| 23 | As far as Humphreys is concerned , firms which occupy the high ground in executive search are not necessarily limited in the variety , volume or type of search work that can be undertaken ; for example , Tyzack 's recent work includes finding the chairman of London Transport , looking simultaneously for three chief executives for an international trading company in the Far East , Europe and the US ( none of whom was to earn less than US$450 000 ) , searching for the chairman of the Monopolies & Mergers Commission , tracking down the chief executive of a building society and the MD of a conglomerate which , during the search , was defending itself against likely take-over bids . |
| 24 | It was Saturday morning and suburbia was busying itself with the tasks it likes so much . |
| 25 | From the other side of the room , from the shadows of the wood-store where they had entered , something was dragging itself across the floor towards them … |
| 26 | He laid out the argument : the Mirror had gone to Maxwell and dived downmarket , along with its Sunday counterpart ; the Mail on Sunday was repositioning itself after its disastrous launch , but had still not recovered . |
| 27 | By then Cameron 's mind was rousing itself from shock , there were many things he wanted to say to James , but the moment they stepped down under the massive archway of the prison they were hustled in opposite directions . |
| 28 | This body was to turn itself into the Labour Party in 1906 . |
| 29 | Such self-disgust appeared to have physical causes or manifestations : a pattern that was to repeat itself at irregular intervals for the next twenty years . |
| 30 | In some haste he drafted a brief manifesto to show how the Conservative Party was adapting itself to the post-Reform Act political scene . |