Example sentences of "[noun prp] [vb past] been a [adj] [noun] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | Roz Hatch had been a real looker in her time , and the family portrait said one thing to Cowley above all else : we stick together . |
| 2 | Bluebeard had been a private joke — an exclamation she had been unable to stifle as they 'd rounded the cliff at the head of the valley and she had got her first glimpse of the imposing turreted Castell Rocamar . |
| 3 | Old Eddie Mosse had been a strange man to come out of Paradise Street . |
| 4 | Friday had been a busy day . |
| 5 | Kylie had been a 13-year-old slip of a thing when she had last stayed with Dennis and Joan in their home in the village of Cymmer . |
| 6 | The assassins had never been traced , and the British authorities had said they were Sinn Feiners ; it was a stupid accusation , for MacCurtain had been a staunch Republican himself , so nobody had any doubt that the killers were Black and Tans . |
| 7 | Mr Leach had told the court that Curtis had been a staunch supporter of the anti-smoking campaign and that his father had died from lung cancer . |
| 8 | The loss of his agents amongst the Ping Tiao had been a serious setback , and the men he had bought from amongst their ranks had proved unsatisfactory in almost every respect . |
| 9 | Prior to a right-wing military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte in September 1973 [ see pp. 26151-52 ] , Chile had been a parliamentary democracy with an executive President and a National Congress elected by universal adult suffrage . |
| 10 | If Wordsworth had been a simple country boy , they could have patronized him ; the Johnsonian style of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads showed that he could write like the gentlemanly reviewers if he wanted to , and nothing is more infuriating than one of our own sort who ‘ lets the side down ’ . |
| 11 | If Ramsbum had been a human being Amiss might have suspected that he was seriously feeling grief . |
| 12 | The owner before Uncle Titch had been a retired seaman and he 'd renamed it the Turk 's Head , not after an Ottoman warrior , as most people thought , but after a special type of nautical knot that looked like a turban . |
| 13 | Exeter had been a committed Lancastrian who had suffered forfeiture of his estates to the crown , so that in effect the endowment of the Greys was being made out of the royal lands . |
| 14 | Exeter had been a committed Lancastrian who had suffered forfeiture of his estates to the crown , so that in effect the endowment of the Greys was being made out of the royal lands . |
| 15 | From his exile in France Bakhtiar had been a fierce critic of Ayatollah Khomeini , Iran 's spiritual leader following the 1979 revolution . |
| 16 | A tragedy in a way , for I thought that Allan Wells had been a great athlete . |
| 17 | Bringing the Bob Marley had been a good idea , there was n't a cheaper car in the yard , it seemed , except maybe the white Vauxhall Astra with the shirt-button wheels , a car Duncan the Drunken , in a rare lucid moment , had described as a jet-propelled tennis shoe . |
| 18 | The scheme to impose military control over Kinsai had been a logistical catastrophe , and it was the utter inefficiency above all which had made Alexei suspicious . |
| 19 | Thurmaston had been a typical Leicestershire village with all its farmhouses and cottages clustered together and surrounded by its huge open fields until the enclosure award of 1763 . |
| 20 | His landscaping at Quernmore Park near Lancaster had been a great success , as was his probable design for Casterton Hall near Kirkby Lonsdale , which looks uncommonly like Leck . |
| 21 | Well , we 'd played with Kel Nagle , Peter 's best pal , and our opponents in the Canada Cup in Portmarnock had been a certain Arnold Palmer and Sam Snead . |
| 22 | Molly Fletcher had been a pretty girl , but she had the faded air of a flower that has been transplanted into the wrong soil . |
| 23 | Some expanding cities were the creations of the new era ; Yokohama had been a mere fishing village in 1853 , and Kobe , too , owed its expansion to foreign trade . |
| 24 | Coffin wondered if the inhabitants of Drake Towers , with their BMWs and Porsches , knew that the old Francis Drake Street had been a regular thieves ' kitchen . |
| 25 | Toleafoa had been a promising junior when she joined the circuit full time , just over a year ago . |
| 26 | The Visigoths had been a sedentary people living north of the Danube . |
| 27 | If Hazel had been a human being he would have been expected to introduce his companions one by one and no doubt each would have been taken in charge as a guest by one of their hosts . |
| 28 | If the IMF had been a major borrower and issuer of SDR-denominated assets then the SDR might have been used more extensively . |
| 29 | Geneva had been a wasted visit and , more important , wasted time . |
| 30 | The secrecy that surrounded Emor had been a large part of its charm . |