Example sentences of "had be [art] [adj] [conj] a " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | It had not occurred to us that this ranging survey of the idioms of English and incidentally French verse had been no more than a ‘ prologue ’ — and to what , for heaven 's sake ? |
| 2 | But what had been no more than a slowly moving stream less than a couple of metres wide now flowed fast and dark with mud across the full thirty metres of the riverbed . |
| 3 | When she 'd moved in , it had been no more than a yard full of builders ' rubbish . |
| 4 | Though Mosley was represented to future generations as if he had been no more than a gutter politician and demagogue , the truth was that he had first attracted sympathy — if not support from many political figures who were subsequently to disown him . |
| 5 | This done it soon became clear that Clairvaux had been no more than a pretext and that the real problems lay elsewhere . |
| 6 | Burun guessed that Kiku had been no more than a hair's-breadth away from being impaled on the st'lyan 's gilden horn . |
| 7 | In his last memoirs , written in his second exile , he wrote that before 1953 , " I had been no more than a hereditary sovereign , but now I had truly been elected by the people . |
| 8 | Perhaps Piers had been no more than a struggling architect when they had first met , and she had not been content to lead a life of poverty . |
| 9 | To begin with , only the coincidence of the deaths of father and son within four days of each other ; beyond that his notion of a connection had been no more than a hunch , and he had been in the business too long to back his hunches far ahead of evidence . |
| 10 | Subsequently what had been no more than a name implying a certain diplomatic affiliation between the Franks and Valentinian must have been interpreted as providing a genuine indication of the origins of the Franks . |
| 11 | The US ambassador , who had marvelled at the readiness of the British to hazard so much in company with France ( a nation which they were in the habit of disparaging ) , now saw that this had been no more than a passing flirtation . |
| 12 | To Willi and Gerda she had been no more than a romantic inspiration , a cardboard figure of tinsel who ceased to exist when the curtain came down . |
| 13 | If she felt hurt at the realisation that his affectionate gestures had been no more than a front — well , it could only be because her ego was wounded . |
| 14 | For her , their lovemaking might have been an almost mystical fusing of bodies and identities , yet for him it had been no more than a roll in the hay . |
| 15 | Although he differentiated his position from that of Draper , suggesting that the struggle had been between science and dogmatic theology rather than between science and religion , A. D. White insisted that there had been a theological and a scientific view of every question , invariably at odds . |