Example sentences of "[noun pl] had been [v-ing] [adv] " in BNC.
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| 1 | A British Transport police spokesman said : ‘ Fans had been drinking heavily before the accident and would have been fairly merry . ’ |
| 2 | Crimean Tatars had been drifting back to their former homeland since 1987 , and a June 1988 central government ruling confirmed their right to residency [ see p. 36036 ] . |
| 3 | The ovoid seemed to project a kind of deadly aura and , as Rostov compared the black egg shape with his memory of the framework structures which he had encountered previously , he wondered if the designers had been striving consciously for the visual effect which they had achieved . |
| 4 | The stabbing happened after the two teenagers had been drinking heavily . |
| 5 | He said the Iranians had been carrying out assassinations , including that of his own Japanese translator . |
| 6 | The aim was to ensure that subjects had been fixating correctly by requiring them to report this digit immediately prior to recalling the stimulus . |
| 7 | 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 . |
| 8 | Somebody calculated that if the surface of the earth was covered with a layer of protein molecules a metre thick , right over the whole surface of the earth erm each one , each protein different from every other one , and let us suppose furthermore that each of these proteins had been changing once as second , uniquely , into some different kind ever since the formation of the earth , we would still have tried out only quite a small fraction of the available possible proteins a hundred amino acids long . |
| 9 | Well these had got , these cherries had been growing where they could n't see them you know . |
| 10 | The stomach cramps had been coming back , off and on , all day , but so far she had been able to keep them under control . |
| 11 | Their shells had been passing over our positions from time to time all day , with a loud rush that sometimes appeared to shake the trees . |
| 12 | Dave did n't bother to shave until the evenings , and Colin 's shoes had been coming away at the sides for weeks . |
| 13 | Non-oil imports had been rising steadily throughout 1987 and 1988 . |
| 14 | The man with the corkscrew curls had been hanging round , listening and staring at Thomas Clarkson . |
| 15 | For many years our shore-based rummage crews had been picking up increasing quantities of drugs from routine searches of merchant vessels within the ports , but often these smuggling attempts were " one off " jobs by crew members . |
| 16 | She noted , she said with a pained expression , that output from the UK Vehicle Division of United Motors had been falling steadily over the previous ten years . |
| 17 | The signal is dated 1 August 1942 and states that a stream of messages had been coming in from Stirling in the desert regarding the shipment of supplies by Bombays for delivery on 4 August . |
| 18 | I tried all the channels from 1 to 40 in case the hijackers had been messing about with the rig in the truck , but still got nothing . |
| 19 | He said that credit costs had been rising partly as a reaction to global inflationary fears , but that the current high interest rates were necessary and appropriate and were a way of keeping inflation in check . |
| 20 | Troubles had been piling up in recent months as the owners struggled to restore the house 's reputation . |
| 21 | ‘ Before this game , individuals had been performing well , but this was the first time we really played well as a team and it shows just what we are capable of . ’ |
| 22 | 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 . |
| 23 | When questioned they admitted that this state of affairs had been going on for some time . |
| 24 | The Carlists had been building up the paramilitary Requeté since the early days of the Republic and seriously preparing for a rising since 1934 . |
| 25 | The reaction function g(U) then merely becomes a formalization of what Pigou and other classical writers had been saying all along , namely , that downward revisions of the money wage rate would eradicate the phenomenon of general unemployment . |
| 26 | Basically er the broad overall description would be to compensate for the conditions that the tenants had been living in prior to the move . |
| 27 | Things had been moving so slowly in recent months that some Conservative MPs , like Robert Adley , the railway buff who chairs the Tories ' backbench transport committee , were convinced that privatisation was about to be dropped altogether . |
| 28 | Things had been ticking along nicely between them , just as long as she 'd been prepared to forget that she wanted more out of the relationship than a roll in the hay and a bright ‘ cheerio ’ at the airport . |
| 29 | That was back in the early 1600s and things had been improving gradually ever since . |
| 30 | Yet beneath the surface many other things had been happening too . |