Example sentences of "an old " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | One of the group of relatives , an old woman who walked very slowly , also had a letter . |
| 2 | The fancy of a perpetual life , sweeping together ten thousand experiences , is an old one ; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by , and summing up in itself , all modes of thought and life . |
| 3 | An old man has been playing the guitar , but he has left off playing to listen to a young shepherd piping . |
| 4 | I was curious to see what shrift she would receive in Naipaul 's novel : the work of a man who has been spoken of by an old friend , the novelist Paul Theroux , as having in earlier times been ‘ merciless , solitary , and ( one of his favourite words ) unassailable ’ . |
| 5 | The automobile has turned the city inside out , ranging new communities around the periphery and letting the centre rot : not far from the centre is an old slum district where the gangs operate . |
| 6 | Salim is now homeless in the sense that he has shed an old tendency to nostalgia : ‘ the idea of going home , of leaving , the idea of the other place ’ , he takes to be weakening and destructive . |
| 7 | But it was clear , and is clearer still in retrospect , that on a number of occasions an old decorum had been deferred to , or embraced . |
| 8 | The narrator may not wholly be in jest when he refers to sexual intercourse with a certain girl , 17 or thereabouts , as ‘ the ultimate indecorum ’ , and rereaders of the novel are likely to be mindful of the survival here of an old England lived in by people like the middle-aged T. S. Eliot , exponents of a disgusted chastity . |
| 9 | Dear Harsnet , he wrote , the distance between London and Brighton is not very great , and you have even been seen in the vicinity of Brighton , so why not call in on an old friend ? |
| 10 | As Neil Richardson noted in 1980 , ‘ An old town pub is not just an attractive Victorian or Georgian facade , it is a building which is still being used for the purpose for which it was built . |
| 11 | The Italian influence on British cooking has resulted in a shift away from traditional classical sauces and stocks towards an emphasis on ‘ something exquisitely fresh , with the least amount of modification in the process of preparation ’ , to quote from an old Tuscan cookery book . |
| 12 | ‘ Coffee gâteau , mine was , an old family recipe . |
| 13 | He was used to contrasts : Mother taking morning tea in bed with an old shawl round her shoulders and her hair pinned up under a boudoir cap , her face sticky with face cream as he kissed her good bye before school ; and Mother in full evening dress decked out in false pearls , her eyelashes beaded with mascara , dominating the stage in any play 's Last act … |
| 14 | A few years back , I bought an old desk at an auction and , when I got it home , found that the drawers had not been emptied by its previous owner . |
| 15 | He emerged with an old edition of Burkes Landed Gentry . |
| 16 | ‘ And Bob 's your uncle , so to speak ? ’ said the inspector , paying unconscious tribute to an old nepotism . |
| 17 | ‘ What we want , then , Inspector , ’ he said bracingly , ‘ is a new avenue or fresh look at an old one . ’ |
| 18 | ‘ Oh , a new look at an old problem , ’ said Henry Tyler at once . |
| 19 | Workers at an old fashioned brewery , upset by a take-over , decide to start their own employee-owned brewery . |
| 20 | ‘ An old flame . ’ |
| 21 | ‘ No , she 's just an old flatmate of mine , that 's all . |
| 22 | It is surprising what can be achieved in an old and complex building to provide for disabled people and also how much the internal and external architecture can benefit from the refurbishment that the opportunities of converting a building for disabled access can provide . |
| 23 | A modern lift can be elegantly installed in an old building . |
| 24 | Of course this has always been the case for all entrants , for there are only forty-three chief constables and the same number of deputies , so few have a chief officer 's truncheon in their knapsack ( to paraphrase an old army chestnut ) . |
| 25 | Our lists contained the names of the family ‘ prigs ’ we knew were professional thieves and burglars ; and of whom I was advised on my arrival in the department by an old detective : ‘ you only get one chance a year to nail these bastards if you are lucky , so when you do , its got to be watertight ’ . |
| 26 | In a similar vein , a cartoon in Police magazine ( January 1981 ) repeats an old joke but puts it into the mouth of a totally bald senior officer . |
| 27 | I 'm just an old bitch . |
| 28 | God , what an old hippy I am , jeered Jay . |
| 29 | Jay 's rainbow wings fluttered around a sun-sparkling river that had become her life , where she had been moping by an old canal full of dead shopping trolleys for years . |
| 30 | He used the complete gamut of his voice , from a growl like a dog warning its master that it has a sore foot to a high , exalted monotone which he kept for perorations ; and when he was using the words of an Old Testament lament , Isaiah or Zephaniah , to make a piteous effect , he had been known to put his head back and yowl like a tom-cat . |