Example sentences of "he [vb past] [adv] [be] a [adj] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | He 'd always been a superb judge of character , but now he doubted himself . |
| 2 | The lamb he was after he saw now was a black and white one that had been sickly and Jack had kept in the lambing-shed a long time . |
| 3 | He said he had briefly been a Labour Party member in 1974 . |
| 4 | He had also been a close friend and political ally of Keating for more than 20 years , and had been influential in engineering Keating 's successful bid for the leadership in December 1991 [ see pp. 38675-76 ] . |
| 5 | He had also been a talented professional wrestler in his youth ( i.e. a good actor ) and still gave the impression that he could look after himself if pushed around . |
| 6 | He had previously been a junior minister at the Department of Energy and financial secretary to the Treasury . |
| 7 | He had already been a first-year seminarian when Eduardo was five . |
| 8 | Then , after Mr Dalglish had shocked the soccer world by resigning in the middle of last season , Mr Moran left the boot room to steady the ship , until Graeme Souness was free to leave Glasgow Rangers and return to Liverpool , where he had once been a key player . |
| 9 | He had always been a good and generous man . |
| 10 | he screamed to persuade himself that he was not frightened , and suddenly the barricade dissolved in an explosion of smoke through which the musket flames stabbed like shivers of light and the General 's long white moustache was whipped by a bullet that went on to tear away his left ear-lobe , but that was the only injury he took for he had always been a lucky man , and he caught a glimpse of long weeds shivering under the silver water beneath the bridge , then he kicked his heels hard back , and his awkward ugly horse clumsily jumped the heaped-chairs at the right-hand end of the barricade . |
| 11 | He knew , in his heart , that he had always been a little bit frightened of it really … opening out the throttle … he remembered the feeling of queasiness that had always accompanied that burst of power . |
| 12 | Such signs of relative forgiveness on the part of the leaders he had persecuted so relentlessly in the past , particularly Deng Xiaoping , offer perhaps the clearest insight into Chen 's career : he had never been a political force in his own right but merely a faithful interpreter and executor of Mao 's will . |
| 13 | He had never been a great wine drinker , but on every visit to the Mayfair Hotel in London ( which he used often ) he was presented with a complimentary bottle of wine . |
| 14 | Although he had been a member of both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate he had never been a true man of Congress . |
| 15 | He had never been a happy sightseer and until his work was done , until Harry Lawrence 's killer was identified and caught he could n't see himself playing the tourist at the Changing of the Guard , or the Tower of London , even Poets ' Corner which he had longed to see , as a passionate student of English poetry … that would have to wait . |
| 16 | At the time of the Westerfield poisonings he had sometimes been a difficult man to agree with , and he 'd more than once annoyed her by his attitude . |
| 17 | In the Titan he had only been a partial paladin — merely part of a vaster amplified body which also comprised Tundrish and Valence and Zed Juron and , oh yes , Akbar too . |
| 18 | What he wanted now was a normal married life away from uniforms , fighting , and the whole insanity of men being paid to kill their fellow-men . |