Example sentences of "[prep] [noun] [pers pn] had be [v-ing] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | For ages he had been meaning to call in at a place down by the Elephant and Castle where they sold gramophone parts , but it was not until this morning that he had finally got around to it . |
| 2 | For months they had been trying with divets and tackle to hoist the appropriate two-ton stone upright and into its hole . |
| 3 | Of course he had been working for Hut 6 from the day of his arrival at Bletchley and his duties soon became important . |
| 4 | Of course she had been waiting . |
| 5 | However , the FoE did welcome a number of proposals they had been campaigning on for some time . |
| 6 | He reached behind him , lifted the pint of porter he had been drinking and began to sip it , making no effort to move . |
| 7 | 19 October 1799 ; off the southern tip of the Isle of Weight she had been escorting a convoy of merchant ships through the English Channel until , in comparative safety , the convoy dispersed to their destinations . |
| 8 | Abruptly , Ratagan threw the chunk of bread he had been gnawing into the fire . |
| 9 | Since the end of May it had been beating irregularly . |
| 10 | With a gloomy wantonness of imagination I had been coquetting with the hideous possibles of disappointment . |
| 11 | In any case , if Parson Woodforde 's manservant Ben Leggatt found himself temporarily ‘ out of pocket ’ , all he had to do was to pawn the best pair of trousers he had been wearing over the weekend and redeem them in time for church on Sunday . |
| 12 | It must have felt lonely when a respected customer ( whose name was not exposed even to me ) dropped from under her coat the bag of flour she had been concealing there . |
| 13 | He marched straight up to Nina and , pointing to his chest , said : ‘ Je suis Modigliani , Juif , Jew ’ , and unrolled a roll of newspaper he had been carrying . |
| 14 | General Carson laid down the slip of paper he had been studying and looked at the colonel seated across the table from him . |
| 15 | Hyacinth , happily unused to the ways of the more unscrupulous telly interviewer , promptly stuck a roll of paper she had been carrying into the broadcaster 's eye , thus bringing the proceedings to a close . |
| 16 | She found him uncouth and dirty and he often smelt of abattoirs and of the chicken carcases or sides of beef he had been painting . |
| 17 | A crowd of eager customers would be awaiting his arrival outside the shops and attack him for the particular colour , size or style of dress they had been waiting for . |
| 18 | Having accepted the ground rules , all the Grants appreciated and relished a structure that allowed a degree of communication they had been missing for years . |
| 19 | He remembered a piece of music he had been carrying around in his head for years and bragged that he knew a better tune . |
| 20 | Considering the amount of pressure they had been exerting , there should , Briant felt , be a different atmosphere about them . |
| 21 | The broad effect of the Act was to enable societies to offer the extended range of services they had been lobbying for . |
| 22 | The court was told he had used cocaine and heroin and he also admitted that in addition to a cocktail of drugs he had been drinking heavily the evening before the incident . |
| 23 | Maeve sat crouched over a table using a pool of light from a huge candelabra to stab furiously with her needle at a piece of embroidery she had been working on for years . |
| 24 | He was a small boy of six who lived just around the corner from her , and for days he had been going on about this great talking parrot his father had given him . |
| 25 | ‘ For years we had been trying to lower and streamline the bonnets of front-engined cars and the mid-engined configuration allowed us to obtain an extremely low nose , deeply recessed between sculpted front wings that sloped down to the headlights , which were contained in a plexiglass fairing to continue the line . |
| 26 | Moreover the meaning is not at all the same as with to + infinitive , as can be seen from the sample sentences below : ( 39 ) For years she had been driving illegally with a licence obtained in Italy where her brother had sent the examiner a case of wine — not necessary , but she had felt bolstered . |
| 27 | Bob Mays had to confront the fact that for years he had been loving someone else 's daughter . |
| 28 | In desperation , the previous week , he had ordered the children to select a favourite passage from books he had been reading with them , write it out in their best handwriting and then add some comments on what they enjoyed about the piece and about the book in general . |
| 29 | In fact he had been churning them out all along . |
| 30 | In fact she had been feeling tired and queasy for the past few days ; and that night , when the leading man laid her on the sofa , suddenly turned her head and , without letting the audience see , vomited quietly down the sofa back . |