Example sentences of "[noun sg] [was/were] [to-vb] [pron] [prep] the " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | The government 's obvious intention was to identify me as the main source of all the criticism and speculation running counter to the official line on Flight 103 and then to destroy me . |
| 2 | The only way he knew to heal the pain of his humiliation was to punish her for the crime of leaving him . |
| 3 | The tactic used by the Commission for passing the Single European Act was to present it to the member states as if it were the only thing on offer : either take this or leave the Community . |
| 4 | However : What Mr Taylor [ for the council ] said … was … that the common assumption which lay behind the agreement was that the council was the owner of the … land and that Mr Tillson had no interest in either parcel of land beyond the tenancy which the council was to grant him by the transaction . |
| 5 | She also reveals how the actor who tried to make the world a better place was to rescue her from the brink again . |
| 6 | ‘ My first reaction was to get someone from the British Transport Police , but the door of their office was locked . |
| 7 | My sister 's job was to meet her at the bus stop with the wheel basket so she did n't have to carry it up the road . |
| 8 | Because i in , in theory presumably they s they should n't have been abusing their position , they should n't be gaining more because the whole point was to do it for the masses particularly , I mean if you were a Party cadre erm you should n't be getting more out of it than anybody else . |
| 9 | The aim was to put them on the spot — or at least to impress the Inspector with your knowledge and concern . |
| 10 | His special gift was to get us on the move , send us out to the butcher to buy that good piece of veal , into the kitchen to discover how delicate is the combination of veal , carrots , little onions , a scrap of bacon , seasonings and butter all so slowly and carefully amalgamated — and all done with butter and water alone . |
| 11 | This body was to turn itself into the Labour Party in 1906 . |
| 12 | The only way to banish the bogeyman was to look him in the eye without flinching . |
| 13 | Employing one of those supremely disingenuous somersaults of logic that only long training in double-speak and the official brand of British arrogance can confer , Mr Howard told a Westminster audience of backbenchers that ‘ If the Commission were to take us to the European Court I can think of few things more calculated to bring the Commission into disrepute ’ |
| 14 | It would be sad if ill-health were to deprive him of the chance to become the first democratically-elected president of South Africa . |
| 15 | One of the worst things that could happen to a pupil was to leave something in the dining room by mistake after dinner . |
| 16 | A Norwegian freedom fighter who knew the area was to take her to the nearby village , after which she was on her own . |
| 17 | My first thought was to put them in the dustbin . |
| 18 | His first thought was to do something to the Volkswagen Passat . |
| 19 | It must have seemed to them that Marian and Allen had perished in the flames and their own immediate concern was to remove themselves from the danger of the roof falling in on their heads and from the certain consequence that so conspicuous a fire in the night would be seen by the outlaws and would sooner or later bring them to the scene . |
| 20 | Later we were to have several talks , but when I first arrived sick and ill and my GP went through the diagnosis , his greatest concern was to get me into the hands of a good specialist which he did with the utmost speed . |
| 21 | And perhaps Labour 's greatest ever mistake was to saddle it with the label ‘ poll tax ’ , thereby fixing in the public mind the link between voting and taxation . |
| 22 | Does it really matter that those were early days , when the joke on campus was that the only way to kill anyone with a laser was to hit them over the head with it ? |
| 23 | The predominant response to Mannheim 's proposals for the sociology of knowledge in the English-speaking world was to incorporate it into the programme of ‘ scientific ’ , functionalist sociology . |
| 24 | It was her firm belief that the quickest way to achieve mental health was to absorb oneself in the problems of others and , in this particular centre , it seemed to have worked . |
| 25 | There was the Cambridge Rapist in his mask with references to ‘ A Hard Day 's Night ’ — the idea was to link it to the death of The Beatles ' manager , Brian Epstein , during a supposed bout of homosexual S&M . |
| 26 | To be seriously concerned with this field was to expose oneself to the possibility of ridicule when it turned out that one had been deceived by a clever confidence trickster ; at best it led to controversy , to results which were suggestive rather than conclusive , and away from those straightforward and answerable questions which since Galileo 's time had been the essence of scientific research . |
| 27 | To flash a badge was to risk someone in the crowd remembering his face and in the future , on another job , he could fingered as the stoolie he truly was . |
| 28 | The repeated attacks of this last disease were to trouble him for the rest of his life . |
| 29 | He pulled Carla into his arms and closed his eyes , feeling a vast , directionless violence , as if his task were to kill everyone in the world and the problem was how to start . |
| 30 | To cling to a Polish identity was to exclude oneself from the German monopoly on higher education and from all but menial employment in industry ; given the rapid depopulation of the countryside it was also to insist on the right to become and remain part of a backward , ignorant , illiterate , inward-looking agrarian people , stuck in a rural backwater with no access to the outside world , with scant interest from that world and little hope of progress . |