Example sentences of "[noun] i had been [v-ing] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | ‘ For the last four summers I had been working at Appel Farm Arts and Music Centre in New Jersey as head of music , ’ Ken explained . |
| 2 | And then , you see , it halted where it did because there were some petals and fragments from the blackthorn I had been handling fallen into the spine there , shaken out of my sleeve or my hair when I closed the book . |
| 3 | I had certainly found the rural setting I had been hankering after . |
| 4 | Already , I felt , I could feel the benefit of the work I had been undertaking . |
| 5 | On the other hand no one else did the work I had been doing over the past year . |
| 6 | Often , when I switched on the light to make sure that the dish was scraped clean , I was disgusted at the mess I had been eating . |
| 7 | One second I had been speeding at fifty miles an hour along a ribbon of uninterrupted concrete ; the next , to the wide-eyed amusement of a group of policemen standing beside a checkpoint , there was a loud crunch , every shock absorber on the Nissan thudded home to its end-stops and I found myself dead in the water by a pothole large enough to accommodate half Balboa 's army . |
| 8 | The sun I had been dreaming of was dark , and the real sun was nothing : nothing but what it was . |
| 9 | Our conversation moved cautiously round the subject of corruption in public life , and I quoted Burke , whose Thoughts on the Present Discontents I had been studying , to the effect that wisdom consisted in part in deciding how much evil to tolerate . |
| 10 | I must have known that those were the very advantages I had been denying myself in denying myself food . |
| 11 | I decided to go back to the village , to thank him for all his help , and to carry out a plan I had been considering for some time . |
| 12 | Although Eliot considered this idea a good one , especially in view of the articles I had been writing for the New English Weekly ( for example , ‘ Italy must Choose ; and ‘ An Open Letter to Ansaldo ’ , which Mairet had forwarded to the spokesman in question and also to the Vatican ) , he felt that such a book issued in time of war , would need official backing . |
| 13 | I had a question I had been intending to ask him . |
| 14 | And the question I had been holding down with my domestic frenzy , my sorting and tidying , my focus on Matter , burst through : would the decay have set in ? |
| 15 | For two years previous to the war I had been painting ; before that I was a school master teaching drawing and painting . |
| 16 | In those days I had been doing a good deal of drawing ; and , having come under Wyndham Lewis 's influence , I took my Vorticist efforts round to the Master , and , to my surprise , I found that he thought quite well of them . |
| 17 | With a gloomy wantonness of imagination I had been coquetting with the hideous possibles of disappointment . |
| 18 | I presume neither Mr Baker nor Mrs Rumbold was aware that for over ten years I had been conducting a campaign to make creative writing a central feature of the English curriculum , and that in October 1983 I helped to organise a manifesto on this subject which was published in the Times Higher Education Supplement . |
| 19 | In all the years I had been watching him , he had , as far as I could tell , absolutely fuck-all interest in them . |
| 20 | For four years I had been planning this journey , and the thought of exploring Aussa and discovering what happened to the Awash had seldom been out of my mind . |
| 21 | For a while I had been ringing the Lost Property office at Queen Street station each week , still pathetically hoping that the bag with Uncle Rory 's poems and Darren Watt 's Möbius scarf would somehow miraculously turn up again . |
| 22 | All the while I had been telling my young passenger what I was going to do . |
| 23 | We began by talking about food , but food quickly became boring and was replaced by feelings , the things I had been trying to stuff down with food . |
| 24 | Until very late the previous night I had been writing about Krakatoa and trials by Fire , and was deeply asleep when the cat woke me . |
| 25 | So , in a paper written to commemorate the life and work of Danny Lehrman , whose critical interest in ethology and psychiatry had been considerable , I argued pessimistically ( Crook 1977 a ) that an understanding of the primate behaviour I had been reviewing ‘ provides no more than a kind of educational backcloth — a reference literature for university courses on human evolution and that it can not begin to touch upon the existential issues that are the central focus of living human relations . |
| 26 | I relaxed those muscles I had been clenching . |
| 27 | A Spanish recruit I had been playing poker against started making faces and gesturing behind the Padre 's back , when suddenly , without taking his eyes off the Frenchman to whom he had been talking , the priest jerked his elbow backwards into the Spaniard 's face , slamming him against an oven . |
| 28 | For the past week I had been learning lines in preparation for an appearance in a new play due to start rehearsing later that month , and I loathed interruptions . |
| 29 | The small government flat I had been expecting turned out instead to be a large if simple village haveli , occupied by Mr Postman 's extended family — his three brothers , their children and Mr Postman 's old mother . |
| 30 | If you take into account the fact that I have been up till after midnight every night since Monday , that I have a cold , and that that morning I had been talking on a sore throat from 9.30 to 1 o'clock , perhaps you will understand . ’ |