Example sentences of "[pers pn] [vb past] [adv] been a [noun sg] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Well , I 'd always been a bit too busy — and clever ! |
| 2 | Well then while I was serving as a detective , you can just imagine I made plenty of arrests , and I got along reasonably well with most people , but there was one man I hated yes I hated him , I , I 'd only been a detective I should think for a period of about , oh five or six months , and a man , he called on the Reverend who was the , the vicar of St. Mary where |
| 3 | I had already been a prisoner nearly a year and had not yet escaped . |
| 4 | I had never been a member of the Labour Party , and on the first occasion when I could claim a vote I voted for the Liberal candidate in the Hampstead constituency . |
| 5 | ‘ Before all this I had never been a fisherman but I have now taken it up and am enjoying it , ’ he said . |
| 6 | I had long been a believer in voluntary euthanasia , and my mother 's experience strengthened it ; for to me what matters most is not the length of a person 's life but its quality , and that death , when it comes , should have dignity . |
| 7 | I had then been a night junior . |
| 8 | ‘ Also , if you 'd really been a journalist you 'd have known what a ‘ stringer ’ is . |
| 9 | She had n't deserved their kindness , their good wishes — she 'd hardly been a boon companion of late . |
| 10 | She had also been a builder before coming to the school and ended up doing most of the work . |
| 11 | In the last ten years she had also been a magistrate , and had become chairman of the Committee of Magistrates . |
| 12 | Grace Bird , whom he had worked with before and of whom he was fond , spent most nights up at the hospital knitting in the waiting-room while Dotty ministered to poor old Dickie St Ives , and although he respected Mary Deare as a performer — she was possibly the best Peter since Nina Boucicault — she had never been a chum . |
| 13 | She had never been a snob in the unpleasant sense of the word , but she had always set great store by Father 's material success , and later by my having been to Oxford and then on my becoming a doctor . |
| 14 | She had always said she had never been a shop-girl and she was n't going to start now . |
| 15 | She had never been a Bonapartist , yet that distaste had not made it any easier for her to leave France and follow an army that must fight against her countrymen . |
| 16 | It should n't ; she had never been a woman to give a damn about other people 's opinions . |
| 17 | Eugénie had not long been an Empress , but she had always been a grandee of Spain , with all that implied in pride and good breeding . |
| 18 | There was , she found , a certain satisfaction to be got from standing behind a counter ; she had always been a customer , at the receiving end , until now . |
| 19 | The sort of ‘ gallivanting about ’ that he seemed always to associate with her had never been a part of her life at all . |
| 20 | Lots of fiery meetings and grand gestures , plenty of petitions to Washington and protests outside John Wayne movies , but in the end they had just been a bunch of dumb redskins battering their heads against the white man 's bricks . |
| 21 | They had always been a task force in their own right and had a head start in this respect with their trained crews specialising in interceptions at sea and rummage duties , traditional skills which could now be deployed more swiftly and utilised more efficiently by use of new radio equipment and position finding navigational aids such as radar and Decca Navigators . |
| 22 | You see , he 'd once been a costermonger himself , but that was before he married Miss Roach , the baker 's daughter . |
| 23 | He 'd always been a dairy farmer , you see , like I am . |
| 24 | Lawrence could n't make you feel that , because he 'd never been a worker . |
| 25 | Hitherto it had largely been a matter of intellectual interest and the best-known example was the study of the The Peasant Question ( 1937 — 1938 ) by two of the Party 's foremost members , Truong Chinh and Vo Nguyen Giap . |
| 26 | I pointed out that it had already been a month , and there was no record of me on the Chicago computer . |
| 27 | G9 had not only secured Titron — it had also been a probe . |
| 28 | The duke 's campaign of the previous season , which had won Berwick for the crown , may have whipped up enthusiasm for future conquests , but it had also been a lesson in the expense and difficulty of winning a small piece of land and the cost of keeping it thereafter . |
| 29 | The duke 's campaign of the previous season , which had won Berwick for the crown , may have whipped up enthusiasm for future conquests , but it had also been a lesson in the expense and difficulty of winning a small piece of land and the cost of keeping it thereafter . |
| 30 | His first impression was that somebody had started to construct a small harbour , but then he saw a shallow groove cut in the face of the cliff which must at one time have accommodated a pipe , and it occurred to him that it had probably been a sewage outfall . |