Example sentences of "[conj] [noun] had [been] the " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Of a random sample of 644 female householders who were or had been married , 87 or 14% had been the victims of rape or attempted rape by their husbands or ex-husbands . |
| 2 | He knew everyone who mattered , and it was luck as much as anything else — what if reggae or jazz-funk had been the dominant force then ? — but Parsons was still capable of grabbing the opportunity when it knocked . |
| 3 | Official sources were quoted by the Agence France-Presse news agency ( AFP ) on Jan. 14 as alleging that Aref had been the financial backer of an attempt to assassinate political and military leaders ; if the plan had succeeded , they claimed , a " civil war " between the Afar and Issa communities " would have been inevitable " . |
| 4 | It was ironic to Victor and the colleagues sitting round the table that morning that Gorbachev had been the KGB choice as leader . |
| 5 | In October 1988 stories began circulating that Kylie had been the victim of a crazed sex-attacker . |
| 6 | In this extract the hero approaches Stonehenge : Some readers have found the human sacrifice image ‘ juvenile ’ , and it is reminiscent of the general level of The Vale of Esthwaite ; but in Wordsworth 's defence one must point out that everybody believed that Stonehenge had been the scene of human sacrifice , and continued to do so until this century ( see , for instance , Hardy 's Tess of the D'Urbervilles ) . |
| 7 | This week we read of him losing to an unranked Swede who virtually apologised after the match , explaining that Borg had been the reason for his getting into tennis in the first place . |
| 8 | Sarazen was so sure that Daniels had been the key to his win that he asked for the old boy to be with him when he was presented with the claret jug , saying it was a ‘ team victory ’ . |
| 9 | Israel 's Supreme Court on Jan. 20 rejected a defence plea to free John Demjanjuk , convicted of war crimes in April 1988 [ see p. 36189 ] , refusing to admit evidence allegedly showing that Demjanjuk had been the victim of mistaken identity [ see p. 37898 ] . |
| 10 | Would the shed 's inhabitant necessarily guess that Mungo had been the uninvited visitor ? |
| 11 | During his visit to London , President Yeltsin noted that Britain had been the first country to denounce the August coup , and the first to recognise Russia ; the first to propose Russian membership of the International Monetary Fund ; the first to propose an April deadline for that membership ; and the first to support a stabilisation fund for the rouble . |
| 12 | Her parents had not accepted the grounds of referral to a children 's hearing , that L had been the victim of an offence , and the case had gone before Sheriff Sir Stephen Young at Greenock Sheriff Court . |
| 13 | I thought back to something Barbara had said not long before , that John had been the glue that bonded all his friends together , the magnet which drew everyone closer . |
| 14 | In his report Sir Edward said that planning matters and roads had been the association 's major considerations . |
| 15 | Ruth was in love with the island , all of it , and Fernando had been the perfect , loving guide and everything was looking so good … but now this wretched ankle business had made her feel utterly miserable and vulnerable . |
| 16 | Clearly , if money had been the kidnappers ’ motive … ’ |
| 17 | The well-tried Roman policy of divide and rule had been the basis of Augustan diplomacy and continued during the conquest . |
| 18 | Up to this period , mining had been essentially a hand-craft where , as in farming , man-power and horse-power had been the chief means of winning the product . |
| 19 | It had been Eleanor , quiet , firm , devoted whom Dorothea had loved , and Eleanor had been the only living person whose presence she could bear when Hallam died a year after their coming to Haverstock . |
| 20 | Of course the answer is changing the myth would have made Moses Hebrew and not Egyptian , because if Moses had been the daughter of Pharaoh he would had to been Egyptian and that the Hebrews could n't tolerate because at a later stage their religion became strongly ethnic and racially divided , you really got to be born Jewish to be Jewish , so they could n't tolerate their , their founding fathers of not being anything but Jewish , so they altered it , they changed the records and they falsified the myth , but they left this glaring inconsistency in it , so the myth is no longer it 's er rewritten and this is one of the little bits of evidence and now of course erm if you do n't take psychoanalyst insights into the family romance seriously , that may not cut much ice for you , but if you erm appreciate the force of these unconscious stereotypes in creating this like this , it 's cert it 's a quite potent piece of evidence because you think well why should the , the Bible change the myth , why ca n't it just put up with the normal myth . |
| 21 | Around the time of the bombing , Megrahi had been security chief for Libyan Arab Airlines and Fhimah had been the airline 's station officer in Malta . |
| 22 | Letelier and Moffit had been the victims of a car bomb in Washington , but Chile 's Supreme Court had twice refused requests from the US government for the extradition of Contreras and Espinoza , and military courts had repeatedly refused to re-open proceedings against them . |
| 23 | She knew very well what they had been at ; she and Patten had been the same , when they were young . |
| 24 | At school she and Adam had been the different ones , the Demdykes — the ones with a dead mother and a crazy father . |
| 25 | Procrastination , compromise and delay had been the response of successive governments of both political parties . |
| 26 | The open-top Dreadnoughts and Toastracks had been the mainstay of the Promenade route for many years , and Manager Luff proposed to replace them with modern equivalents . |
| 27 | Mr Chambers ' name and virtues had been the main topic of her mother 's conversation for the last two months , and no matter how many times Honor expressed her dislike of the man , Flora continued to press the subject . |
| 28 | Irons and radios had been the only appliances owned by the majority of consumers before the War and they were joined by electric fires at the end of it . |
| 29 | What if revenge had been the motive rather than the silencing of a witness ? |
| 30 | Christians and Muslims had been the victims of sectarian assassinations . |