Example sentences of "had been [verb] a [adj] [noun] " in BNC.
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1 | Mr Butler had been taking a collection-box home when he was attacked on the Tube , kicked in the face , kneed in the stomach , had his head banged against a door and almost strangled . |
2 | The other women often talked about young men they knew , and one of them had been taking a young man back to her flat during the evenings . |
3 | Kochen maintained that DEC had been taking a worldwide census of ‘ hundreds of customers ’ recently to ascertain whether OSF/1-on-MIPS was a viable policy . |
4 | He had been serving a 20-year term in Nicosia 's central prison . |
5 | She was to be proved right , as we had been taught a Spartan routine for our babies at ‘ Alderbourne Arches ’ the pre-natal training unit . |
6 | He said the soldier told him he had been struck a glancing blow by the car , but that he had not been knocked over and afterwards had been able to continue on duty . |
7 | Her earlier fears had faded and she thought how foolish she had been to let a ridiculous fancy disturb her happiness . |
8 | The only good news to offset my ‘ disgrace ’ was that Father had proved such a success at Marconi 's that he had been appointed an assistant manager in the research department dealing with radio materials . |
9 | The headmistress and the governors of the school named were justly irate , for , they stated with concerted vehemence , no child had witnessed the recovery of the body of a murder victim from the canal : those children who had not been making stegosauruses out of old egg boxes had been learning an Ashanti war dance , and not one had been in the playground , which was the only vantage point from which body recovery would be observable . |
10 | Some believed indeed that the original intention of Soviet Mediterranean deployments had been to induce a negotiated withdrawal of the United States ' Sixth Fleet . |
11 | I had been swimming a long time that first Sunday , far out in the bay , and he could easily have slipped the things on to the Bourani end of the beach while I was in the water . |
12 | Here the buildings were disfigured almost beyond recognition ; some had fallen into the street while others leaned outwards , a hopeless thoroughfare of broken concrete , stones , weeds and pillaged furniture across which had been built a low barricade made of chairs , doors and broken tables . |
13 | He could explain that this had been written a long time ago , when he was quite a different person . |
14 | The afternoon had been declared a local holiday , as everyone knew , and it would be a fitting finale to the year 's thoroughbred racing programme at Assiniboia Downs . |
15 | Controversy surrounded the release in January 1991 of four Belgian hostages in Lebanon [ see p. 37977 ] , when it emerged that Walid Khaled , the spokesperson in Lebanon of the extremist Revolutionary Council of Fatah ( RCF ) who had helped negotiate their release , had been granted a three-month tourist visa on Jan. 11 , one day before the hostages ' release and at a time of great international tension because of the Gulf crisis . |
16 | He had never been stripped of his Bulgarian citizenship , and it was officially reported on June 12 that he had been granted a Bulgarian passport . |
17 | As Bishop Brinton said , it had been to restore a rightful heir to his kingdom and to defeat tyranny that the campaign in northern Spain had been fought in 1367 . |
18 | Principally the visit had been to see a senior boy with lifelong problems who had suddenly become unmanageable and would have to be admitted to an asylum , but while there he had been asked to assess Anna Beckett , a child who had moved him strangely . |
19 | It was later compounded by the fall-out from a family explosion : on Roger Ackerley 's death in 1929 the son discovered that , first , his father had been maintaining a separate menage and that , second , the money had run out . |
20 | The year before , she and the Prince of Wales had been sent an unusual gift . |
21 | He had been using a great deal of unnecessary and inappropriate tension when reciting . |
22 | Their G P Felix Lusman had been using a faulty technique for the past five years . |
23 | He had been using an ingenious method . |
24 | She had been called a despicable woman , a scarlet creature , a hussy , a jessy , and on the occasions when her father had taken drink , much worse . |
25 | He had been married to my mother for fifteen years and had been called a bad husband , whereas she had been what is known as a good wife . |
26 | She did not confirm for them that she had been meeting an escaped prisoner and she did not explain the significance of the print-out , but they clearly knew the first and it would be only a short time before they worked out the second . |
27 | In March 1990 , Miklos Nemeth , then Prime Minister , alleged during a parliamentary debate on the January 1990 Danubegate scandal [ see p. 37194 ] that former leaders of the HSWP with the help of the hard-line Czechoslovak and Romanian regimes had been plotting an armed takeover of power in Hungary in the summer of 1989 . |
28 | For this search I teamed up with two young friends , both experienced detector users , who had been searching a nearby farm and thus knew the area well . |
29 | Ever since the two disastrous meetings she had had recently about Matilda , the first with the Headmistress and the second with the dreadful Mr and Mrs Wormwood , Miss Honey had been thinking a great deal about this child and wondering how she could help her . |
30 | Where the lawn had been grew a large clump you could hardly call it a copse — of coconut palms . |