Example sentences of "[noun sg] [vb past] been [art] [noun sg] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | In Puritania , religion had been the stuff of cant , of laws , of promised punishments for behaviour which the Pilgrim 's inner conscience could not condemn . |
| 2 | He contacted E. D. Morel , whose Congo Association had been a model of effective agitation ; Normal Angell , the best known public advocate of pacifism ; and Ramsay MacDonald , who had resigned the leadership of the Labour party when it agreed to vote for the war credits . |
| 3 | The social scientist charged with monitoring and evaluating the project ( Goodman 1979 ) refused to answer the question as to whether or not the experiment had been a success , asserting that this was the wrong question . |
| 4 | A large gloomy bedroom had been the setting of it , hung with draperies , not the kind of thing you would expect a child to sleep in , but it was a little child that lay on the bed , white and still , the elderly man , evidently a doctor , who had seemingly just lifted a looking glass from the parted lips , turning to the young father and imparting the news of death , while the mother in a transport of grief clung to her husband , her head buried in his shoulder . |
| 5 | Traditional football had been an expression of male prowess and village pride sanctioned by custom and loosely supervised by adults . |
| 6 | The most startling and controversial aspect of the shooting had been the use of a Thompson sub-machine gun . |
| 7 | It would , again , have been the ideal weapon if the shooting had been an attempt to make trouble between hawks and doves within the Provisionals . |
| 8 | The boys talked nostalgically about the way fighting had been a part of their fathers ' world ; ‘ about the time old man MacIlroy , half-pissed , had taken on ali the men folk of his very extended family , at his sister 's wedding , and stili had time to call for more beer . |
| 9 | The defendant had been a director of plaintiffs for 13 years and had been in charge of the development and sales of a certain type of heater . |
| 10 | The whole episode had been an education for all , with one revealing truth emerging among many . |
| 11 | The club had been the subject of sustained criticism since October 1988 , when Hibs became the first Scottish football team to be quoted on the Stock Exchange . |
| 12 | As far as she was concerned , the tea had been a success . |
| 13 | The result had been a succession of balance of payments crises , deflationary countermeasures at home , and consequent interruptions to economic growth . |
| 14 | Buying that blank tape had been a waste , for she knew she would never dare play it back . |
| 15 | The primary objective of this study had been an investigation into the in-house language training programmes of leading , multinational German manufacturing companies . |
| 16 | The interview had been a mess . |
| 17 | Marriage Guidance had been a bloke called Kevin who , in Henry 's view , had had designs on Elinor . |
| 18 | In my experience , the marriage bed was uncomfortable , even distasteful , and invariably boring , whereas sex with my lover had been a revelation . |
| 19 | The well-tried Roman policy of divide and rule had been the basis of Augustan diplomacy and continued during the conquest . |
| 20 | The eyes of the man in the doorway had been a reawakening for Sara . |
| 21 | But whatever Neil 's reasons , the ring had been the start of it . |
| 22 | His abduction had been a blow to their attempts to show that they were bringing Lebanon to order . |
| 23 | The labour had been a nightmare . |
| 24 | The judge rejected suggestions that the riot had been a protest against conditions in the Victorian jail . |
| 25 | The wrath of her disappointment had been the instrument of his education , which had taken place in a perpetual rush from site to site of a hastily amalgamated three-school comprehensive , the Aneurin Bevan school , combining Glasdale Old Grammar School , St Thomas à Beckett 's C of E Secondary School and the Clothiers ' Guild Technical Modern School . |
| 26 | Its most spectacular action had been the production , in June , of a separate memorial addressed to the employers ( referred to as the " We Women " memorial ) . |
| 27 | The explosive had been a two-ounce wafer of Semtex , composed of 45 per cent Penta Tetro Ether Nitrate ( or PETN ) , 45 per cent RDX and 10 per cent plasticizer . |
| 28 | Only after the war was it revealed that reports concerning the role of the task force had been an element of allied disinformation as it had already been decided not to conduct an amphibious assault . |
| 29 | It is not pleasant to be shot at , and even the pleasure of being missed is spoilt by the mind 's habit of constructing alternative scenarios ; if the machine-gunner had been a bit quicker to react , or had led us with more skill , we would now be nothing but a heap of molten metal somewhere in the sea-grape . |
| 30 | Then she walked to the door , and tried to open it , just in case the sound of the key had been a figment of her over-active imagination . |