Example sentences of "[pron] [vb past] be the first " in BNC.

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1 all the satellites hanging down it was very good the way it had all been done in , in that respect but what I found was the first bit was very boring , I found but when it got going a bit it was better but the whole moral of the story was that nowhere is perfect to live but it 's hard for y young children like this
2 ‘ What I saw was the first draft of the first letter .
3 I began there as someone who was already a professor , I had been the first woman Pro-Vice-Chancellor in the country .
4 I had been the first Chairman of Wells-Next-The-Sea , Town Council , but two or three years afterwards , we decided to turn , er , the old cinema , they wanted to turn the old cinema into a Dance Hall .
5 By contrast Sofia , the capital , was the stronghold of the UDF , which comprised some 16 different parties or movements ranging from the environmental group Eco-Glasnost ( which had been the first to oppose the former communist regime — see p. 36980 ) to Podkrepa , the rapidly growing free trade union movement .
6 The difference between the early days and 1976 was that cars were going a lot faster — Lauda himself had been the first to break the magical seven-minute lap in 1975 — and that very little had been done to make the track safer .
7 The young , nervous and over-eager man who 'd been the first of her assignments for Charlie .
8 She had been the first Western politician to reach the Kurds .
9 She wanted him to plead with her to stay with him , forever , as he 'd done once before , but this time she would accept and tell him how wrong she had been the first time .
10 Despite them the withdrawal went smoothly , with the Colonel , who had been the first man ashore , the last man off , just behind Charley Head , who , as signals officer , had kept up a stream of messages , 40 an hour at one point , that included reassuring but unproven ‘ going well ’ reports .
11 It was obviously different from the religion of Jesus , as far as we understand it , and also from the Jewish vision of St Paul , who had been the first to bring the semitic faith to the hellenistic world of the Roman empire .
12 The dissident who had been the first to speak to Holly talked the hesitant monologue of revolution .
13 It was Canning , after all , who had been the first virtuoso of diplomacy by public opinion .
14 It was all much as it had been the first time , only evening instead of morning ; and Emily stood by herself as before , and now he knew why , wearing his ring on another finger .
15 It had been the first time that he had really seen Sara in tears .
16 It had been the first casino in modern Russia , had operated out of a converted bedroom on the second floor .
17 It had been the first definite sign that something was wrong ; though she had been moody and withdrawn for some weeks before , he had thought this a normal reaction to her baby 's death .
18 He had been the first to reach Maggie , though her screams had brought people running from all the neighbouring tenements .
19 Sheppard , already famous as ‘ the radio parson ’ — he had been the first person to broadcast a church service — was Canon of St Pauls .
20 Sir John Fastolf , involved in a long drawn-out lawsuit in Paris between 1432 and 1435 , could remind the court that he had been the first to jump into the sea when Henry V had come ashore in France in 1415 , and that the king had rewarded him with the grant of the first house which he had seen in France .
21 Once he had been The First Hand Supreme in all Chung Kuo , Master of Masters and eight times winner of the great annual championship held in Suchow .
22 He had been the first to hear the sound of the car approaching , and the quickest to identify it , for he was the only one who looked completely unsurprised as it rolled gently alongside the Aston Martin , while all the rest had checked momentarily and turned to gaze .
23 Matthei had been in post since 1978 , but in the late 1980s he had been the first among the military leadership to recognize the strength of the democratic opposition and the inevitability of political change and , as a result , began to distance himself from the military hardliners .
24 He had been the first serf-owner to take advantage of the reformist Law on Obligated Peasants .
25 What happened was the first recurrence of an experience she had not had since she was a child .
26 It proved a fitting finale to what had been the first period of sustained fighting in the war .
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