Example sentences of "[noun] had been [v-ing] on " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Her admirer had already been bound over to keep the peace after being arrested on her doorstep , and his unwelcome attentions had been going on for over six years . |
| 2 | The experiments , however , involved drawing fibres and blowing bubbles of molten glass and one day , after the work had been going on for some months , Lockspeiser went home leaving the gas torch used for melting the glass still burning . |
| 3 | Quite a lot of the clean-up work had been going on apace of the actual stripdown of the engine so when the latter was finished , the former was not far behind . |
| 4 | Their success revealed the misunderstanding had been going on for six years . |
| 5 | They ended up laughing about that , but it was the uneasy laughter of desperation and displacement , and all they could do after that was finish the whisky and have the joint Rory had been working on , and it was almost a relief when Fergus was sick as a dog out of the window , hanging out barfing onto the slates and into the guttering while Rory tried to clean the plaster off the top bunk and stowed the guns out of harm 's way . |
| 6 | I 'd almost fallen asleep while Uncle Hamish had been droning on . |
| 7 | But he strenuously denied that anything of the sort had been going on anywhere in Europe around the time of the Lockerbie disaster . |
| 8 | Looking back I find it hard to believe that I did n't keep abreast of all the war news ; but the war had been going on for so long that I , like almost every girl of my generation , had lost interest in it . |
| 9 | She knew more about The Hell Fire Club ; she was certain that was what her husband had been working on . |
| 10 | At the other end of the building some very different experiments had been going on involving nuclear physicists who knew of the existence but few of the details of ZETA . |
| 11 | When questioned they admitted that this state of affairs had been going on for some time . |
| 12 | The younger John claimed that Langton had been carrying on an adulterous relationship with his stepmother Joan . |
| 13 | These claims were never universally accepted ; the destruction of the unity of Christendom by the Reformation helped to undermine the authority of the Pope to allocate territory , but it was Catholic France that first challenged Spain 's position in the West Indies and that conflict had been going on for some years when in 1559 , at the end of one round of European wars , France and Spain included in the peace treaty a clause which stated that fighting in regions west of the Azores or south of the Tropic of Cancer was not to be taken as a reason for resuming hostilities in Europe . |
| 14 | Negotiations for a concordat had been going on between Spain and the Vatican for about the same length of time as those between Spain and the United States . |
| 15 | The search for Louise Butler had been going on for over two days . |
| 16 | The argument had been going on for some time . |
| 17 | I thought this phone call had been going on for hours . |
| 18 | In their defence the party leadership could argue that they had been hampered by the lack of a parliamentary majority ; the choice had been hanging on by the skin of one 's teeth or of giving up and holding an election in the face of adverse opinion polls . |
| 19 | All this happened in early spring — the third week in March , I think — and for several weeks of the previous summer Inez had been carrying on with a man staying at one of the St Ives hotels . |
| 20 | The affair had been going on for nearly two years . |
| 21 | The pupils had been going on at me about ‘ You 're always picking on me ’ ' and then finally the boy said to him that he was picking on him because he was black and he said ‘ That just triggered it off ’ . |
| 22 | She had an embarrassed recollection of having burst into tears , of demanding to know how long the affair with Henrietta had been going on . |
| 23 | It was not until the bombing had been going on for almost a week that the Iraqi foreign minister issued a protest . |
| 24 | The bomb Simon Cormack had been carrying on his person was concealed in the broad leather belt he wore around his waist and which had been given him by his abductors to hold up the denim jeans they had also provided for him . |
| 25 | Negotiations had been going on for 17 months before the strike . |
| 26 | A National Grid spokesman yesterday confirmed negotiations had been going on with landowners but he said it was perfectly normal procedure . |
| 27 | Investigations into the activities of this particular smuggling gang had been going on for nearly twelve months prior to the climax of Yashmak and were initiated in Sussex . |
| 28 | In many , the enclosure award of Georgian days was only the final clearing-up of remnants of open field that survived after piecemeal enclosure had been going on for generations or even centuries . |
| 29 | But the two men had argued that the emergency had been going on in Northern Ireland for so long , it was a question whether it was a crisis situation or if it had become normal . |
| 30 | ‘ In the end I could n't bear to be anywhere else , ’ she said , and added that if such practices had been going on in the islands as were alleged , everyone would have known about them . |