Example sentences of "[modal v] [verb] been [to-vb] [adj] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | What a delight it must have been to watch express trains thundering up the bank at Arkwright bridge . |
| 2 | One of Town 's resolutions must have been to make more of their chances . |
| 3 | In all three cases the effect would have been to create merged units of a size able to compete with the many powerful US , European and Japanese companies now increasingly dominating the world scene ; for example , the Leyland/Bedford trucks merger provides a scale that neither could achieve on its own . |
| 4 | This clearly might have been proceeded against as an affray , and counsel 's argument before the Court of Appeal appears to have been that once violence had actually been used , the proper course would have been to charge that offence . |
| 5 | This was a one-off film for Chaplin and he was well aware that to have sustained that role and that theme would have been to sacrifice much of his great following and to have become an artist with a more sectional support . |
| 6 | I had a fleeting thought of what fun it would have been to do this trip with Rosemary . |
| 7 | One obvious alternative to the appointment of the Commissioner would have been to give further jurisdiction to the Industrial Tribunals , instead of the High Court , to enforce such rights which now fall within the scope of the Commissioner 's work . |
| 8 | For Freud , this would have been to replace one set of dogmatic assertions with another set , held by the believers to be for ever true , and providing a sense of false security for them . |
| 9 | His reason for looking after Lennie would have been to get more money from collecting all of Lennie 's . |
| 10 | To have insisted would have been to demand more details about Montaine , and more explanations about their love , than I was entitled to . |
| 11 | The effect of such a drastic change of ownership , especially of tribal lands , would have been to bring new capital into the area with development programmes to exploit the land for profit . |
| 12 | Better practice would have been to discharge such a patient on a Monday and monitor her progress daily , to forestall a weekend crisis . |
| 13 | You may have already decided what sort of walking boots to buy , but the shop assistant will , with barely disguised contempt , correct you , telling you how foolish you would have been to buy such footwear , how lucky it was you came here first , and convincing you that for only an extra £65 you can have the boot you really need . |
| 14 | There are two members I think have spoken from the Liberal benches concerning funding bureaucracy and I would agree entirely with what that means but they 've also mentioned in the same bet , budgetary control and if you 're going to control budgets , you have to have a minimal amount of bureaucracy and the function really of the head of the er of the project , er the head of the the post that 's now slipped into oblivion with this motion , would actually have been to do two things it would have been to hold the two groups together and it would have been to have overall control of that budget and it would n't have been easy and I would n't have like the job and I wouldn't 've applied for it and certainly would have been very difficult indeed . |
| 15 | When the Civil Service proceeded to the first comprehensive retirement programme in the 1850s , the justification for imposing the cowardly administrative convenience of an age barrier was how invidious it would have been to attempt any form of assessment . |