Example sentences of "[pers pn] had been [v-ing] the [adj] " in BNC.
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| 1 | For a while I had been ringing the Lost Property office at Queen Street station each week , still pathetically hoping that the bag with Uncle Rory 's poems and Darren Watt 's Möbius scarf would somehow miraculously turn up again . |
| 2 | The last time I had been on Shunner Fell two years previously I had been walking the Pennine Way and had left Tan Hill on a rainy June day , with heavy clouds following me south as I travelled . |
| 3 | Even when the results came through and the babies were exchanged in a dramatic midnight meeting , Marie found it difficult to believe that she had been nursing the wrong child . |
| 4 | This reminds me of the story about the old lady who boasted she had been wearing the same pair of stockings for twenty years — one year she knitted new feet on them and the next new legs ! |
| 5 | If he knew how old she was he might want her to tell him what she had been doing the last few years . |
| 6 | She had been reviewing the previous week on her walk to the rectory . |
| 7 | We had been conducting the German youths on tours of our favourite places in the city — to the bullring , the restaurants , the bars , the River Tormes , the Casa de Santa Teresa , the Antiguo Colegio Mayor de Iriandeses , San Martin ( where we were nearly locked in for the night ) and to the conventual church of San Esteban . |
| 8 | It was hard to believe we had been indulging the same appetite for climbing and on the same crag I had visited during a July heatwave three years before . |
| 9 | Reading it , the British discovered that they had been speaking the imperial equivalent of prose all their lives . |
| 10 | More distressingly , we discovered that the Aru islands and the Greater Bird of Paradise were no longer on their trading routes and that for the last twenty years they had been pursuing the shorter and more profitable triangular passage between Celebes , Java and Borneo . |
| 11 | Students who are entitled to transitional relief will receive ⅕ of the relief they would have received if they had been paying the full community charge . |
| 12 | It had been pulling the small cart through backstreets for years now and seemed to know instinctively that it would probably be required to stop at any moment , so there was no point in hurrying . |
| 13 | At the direction of his lance master , he had been patrolling the ancient forest of Haling Heart , south of Scaraby , for three seasons and had found no quests with which to occupy himself , never mind accrue funds for the order . |
| 14 | His case was that he had been using the public lavatory for proper purposes when the the police burst into his cubicle and arrested him , and that he had had no contact of any kind with the co-defendant . |
| 15 | ‘ Hello , love , ’ said her father , coming in from the kitchen where he had been shelling the succulent fresh prawns that would form part of a cold seafood and salad lunch , before the hot turkey dinner this evening . |
| 16 | He had been sensing the red death for many days . |
| 17 | He had been following the narrow forest path downhill for some leagues , the trees soaring ever taller overhead , so that the sunlight came down in muted bars between the leaves . |
| 18 | From greeting her with a kiss at breakfast , throughout the morning , and up to ten minutes ago when , at the lunch table , he had covered her hand with his , gazed into her eyes and called her meu amor , he had been playing the adoring fiancé to perfection . |