Example sentences of "[noun pl] had been [v-ing] [prep] a " in BNC.
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| 1 | The Dean crowd and their successors had been smoking as a regular habit ten years earlier but only now , at the height of the Vietnam crisis , when the futility of the war was beginning to dawn with the return of disillusioned young soldiers prepared at last to tell the truth , were drugs beginning to appear on the American campus scene and in London streets in any volume . |
| 2 | The brothers had been living in a penthouse flat in Bickenhall Street , west London , bought in December for £1 million cash . |
| 3 | The animals had been recovering at a wildlife sanctuary , and were ready to go back into the wild . |
| 4 | Because of the recession , stockpiles of ‘ new ’ cars had been waiting for a buyer for up to two years . |
| 5 | If I shifted my weight on to the shoulder these mugs had been using as a football , the pain took away my thoughts from the throbbing ache in my head . |
| 6 | Levels of intermarriage , in the first place , varied considerably from republic to republic and from nationality to nationality ; and although the proportion of ethnically mixed families at the national and republican level might have been increasing , it did not necessarily follow that the incidence of intermarriage between each of the major nationalities had been increasing at a similar rate . |
| 7 | The SNM stated that the relief workers had been riding on a government military lorry ; such lorries were subject to routine attack and they appealed to relief agencies to be " independent " in performing their duties . |
| 8 | He has already been stripped of all his posts , but hardliners had been pressing for a public trial on criminal charges , though this looks unlikely . |
| 9 | It happened that the king of the vookodlaks had been hiding behind a tree , listening while the sun-god talked to the boys . |
| 10 | Many of these children had been attending for a long time , so they already knew many things , specially the important things like how to stand in line and what to do when your pen-nib broke . |
| 11 | The effect of relatively few firearms had been devastating against a warrior race with no previous experience of them . |
| 12 | Two rather hysterical women had been talking in a suburban living-room , the one brunette and hawk-nosed , desperate for approval of a new pair of shoes , the other auburn and bright-eyed , and equally desperate about an undeclared affair her absent husband was having . |