Example sentences of "[was/were] [indef pn] [prep] [art] [adj] " in BNC.
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| 1 | It was possible that these men were nothing but a strong feint designed to draw the allies towards Charleroi while the real French thrust , fuelled by the Emperor 's presence , attacked twenty-five miles to the west at Mons. |
| 2 | I had a glimpse of a fair-haired girl staring wide-eyed and terrified from a tennis court , her racket held loose by her side and tennis balls scattered at her feet and , though the trees and buildings and gardens were nothing but a high-speed blur , my mind nevertheless registered with a startling clarity that the girl had been completely naked . |
| 3 | Seen through the disapproving eyes of respectable citizens they were nothing but a disorderly and disorganized rabble , dropouts from the social ladder . |
| 4 | And so the words turned back on themselves , phrases reappeared , seeming to confirm other phrases , merely repeating themselves , clicking into place with a semblance of logic which nicely disguised the truth that all these words were nothing but a glittering fabric which hovered above the ground , unwinding endlessly , slipping between the fingers , beguiling like a mirage , taking on whatever shape the conjuror wanted , and leading nowhere . |
| 5 | Indeed , one had only to go to Rhodesia to see the ample supply of consumer goods in the shops from every part of the world to realise that sanctions were nothing but an empty farce , and that the claim that they were going to bring Mr Ian Smith to his knees was a total fraud . |
| 6 | The nerves on the first night at Taunton had been bad ; so had the understudy nerves of the first night at the Variety ; but they were nothing to the sheer blind terror that attended Charles Paris as he waited to go on stage in the role in which Michael Banks 's career had been so tragically cut short the night before . |
| 7 | Were nothing to the upset |
| 8 | Were nothing like the real thing |
| 9 | Allan Lamb took over the captaincy and did his best , but it soon became clear that without Gooch they were nothing like the same team . |
| 10 | On these walls were none of the usual posters bidding young mothers to drink milk in pregnancy and bring their toddlers for a twice-yearly check-up . |
| 11 | Adrar was clean , and there were none of the African smells offensive to western noses — just the opposite . |
| 12 | There were none of the battered paperbacks usually left abandoned after rainy afternoons in holiday houses , no near pornography and , she thought , no detective stories , until she remembered the Sherlock Holmes collection beside the bed . |
| 13 | Here there were none of the accustomed party cant or heroics about the Revolution . |
| 14 | The permanent staff was gradually purged to other camps until there were none of the original ‘ old people ’ left . |
| 15 | Standards slipped but there were none of the old crowd now to witness the decay . |
| 16 | Moreover , the papers were run as political ventures ; there were none of the commercial , management , planning and sales activities that were to be found at the Standard . |
| 17 | There were none in the general field of PVC calendering but only in the special field of PVC for adhesive tape . |
| 18 | As for the old houses , there were none in the immediate area that I knew of , other than these which had been built as a nostalgic memento , as a reminder , as a gift both to himself and his family from a man who must have known innately that in discarding the past his people were in danger of losing their touchstone . |
| 19 | We were something of a phantom museum . |
| 20 | ‘ The Hell Fire Club were something of a social embarrassment at the time . |
| 21 | It tells us that the soldiers are thinking back to before the war , to the sun as if it were something in the distant past which they took for granted but has now become their last hope and so they are turning back to nature to put right a problem they caused . |
| 22 | ‘ Maybe people would think we were something like the British Labour Party , ’ he said hopefully . |
| 23 | Growing up in Zimbabwe the group were as likely to hear a record by The Beatles as they were one by a local performer . |
| 24 | But no one here has treated me as though I were anything but a permanent staff member , so do n't have any worries on that score . ’ |
| 25 | Although very much the ‘ poor commons ’ paying for the most part a 5 per cent tax on their goods , they were anything but an undifferentiated whole . |
| 26 | She would crouch by the steps , ignored , till there was no-one on the narrow spiral stair , glide like a slim shadow up to the hall , and when the next stair was free , on up to the bower , where Catriona , wife of the Maclean 's piper , had a baby . |
| 27 | AN INJURED man had repeatedly told police that there was no-one in a derelict boarding house which had been destroyed in an explosion , a jury heard yesterday . |
| 28 | When other people arrived at the scene , and saw that there was no-one in the burnt-out cockpit , they assumed that the pilot had bailed out . |
| 29 | The women believed that the PDC 's stated concern for their welfare was nothing but a hollow promise : |
| 30 | Today the president , Mrs Macpherson , in between gracefully shaking hands with each new arrival and presenting her to Mrs MacDonald , decided that she was nothing but a vulgar upstart , and she trembled with suppressed irritation at having to stand in the same receiving line with her . |