Example sentences of "had been reading " in BNC.
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| 1 | Moreover the novel takes up the remark to Katkov that the criminal ‘ himself morally demands ’ his punishment ( which on its own might mean no more than that Dostoevsky had been reading Hegel or popularized Hegel ) , and builds some marvellous effects upon it . |
| 2 | Anna Grigorevna had been reading Crime and Punishment in the magazine Russian Herald , and she thought she recognized the object ‘ which played such a big part in the Marmeladov family ’ . |
| 3 | Eliot , though , is determined , like the anthropological writers he had been reading , to make plain the root of the custom , which he does in the next line , ‘ And flowers of deflowered maids ’ . |
| 4 | Erika remembered the Watchword Omi had been reading on the day when Karl had come . |
| 5 | On the boat , I had been reading about the shooting of Fergal Caraher at the South Armagh checkpoint at Cullyhanna and now , in the darkness , as details of the story flooded back , I decided against pressing the buzzer . |
| 6 | Peregrine switched the wireless off , imitating the stilted tones of whoever had been reading the news . |
| 7 | During my travels round Ireland , I had been reading Sleeman 's Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Magistrate . |
| 8 | The others , I explained , could be anywhere , as everyone had been reading them . |
| 9 | The chairman , wearing a fawn sports jacket , said he apologised if he had ‘ caused any offence ’ , but said he was annoyed because Mr Loveluck-Edwards had been reading a novel in court . |
| 10 | Like most defectors , Lyalin was suffering from delusions of grandeur and it was hard to judge whether he had been reading too much of Pincher 's material or books by Le Queux dating from the turn of the century . |
| 11 | Kegan looked up from the paper he had been reading and looked a little hopefully at the faces in front of him . |
| 12 | I happened to see Sir John Woods [ Permanent Secretary to the Board of Trade ] tonight and he told me that Sir Stafford Cripps had been reading the minutes of Cabinet committees during his absence [ in India , where he had been for nearly four months trying to reach a settlement which would lead to independence ] and had been depressed by the amount of time and energy taken up in the Ministerial Committees with the discussion of quite minor matters which individual Ministers ought to settle in their discretion . |
| 13 | The story of a man compelled to search for a pure virgin , read one evening while his mother was mending stockings , left him ‘ haunted by spectres ’ whenever he was in the dark ; other stories drew him out to the churchyard , where , with his imagination overflowing , he would race up and down through the great avenue of elm trees , and act out among the docks , nettles and rank grass whatever he had been reading . |
| 14 | I had been reading in Shelvocke 's Voyages , a day or two before , that , while doubling Cape Horn , they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude , the largest sort of sea-fowl … |
| 15 | His foot touched the book he had been reading before he had fallen asleep . |
| 16 | Susan laid down the paper she had been reading , and with one gloved hand made a little peep-hole on the steamy window of the railway carriage . |
| 17 | Nahum was about to close the ledger when his attention was caught by the entry above the one he had been reading . |
| 18 | For instance when in a dream she was conducted by me over a market garden in Aegina , one could guess that she had been reading Angus Wilson 's The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot , in which a market garden figures ; or when I dreamed of a detective novel by her , with a detective bearing her own name and very uncharacteristically dressed there were signs of my addiction to the detective novels of Gladys Mitchell . |
| 19 | ‘ She had been reading her stars on a daily basis like everybody does . |
| 20 | He had been reading some fine sentiments in a little book of Carlyle 's , his Heroes and Hero-Worship . |
| 21 | He said , ‘ Do have a look at the price of some of the things in here , there 's even a knitting machine ’ and there for all to see was an Erka Twinbed Knitting Machine with carrying case and stand for 45 guineas , the very thing Grace Worrell had been asking about in the letter I had been reading only a few seconds before . |
| 22 | That fits Waugh 's 1930s fiction well enough , and in an age that had been reading Proust , Joyce and Virginia Woolf it must all have looked startlingly diagrammatic and technically reactionary : a reactionary politics aptly matched by a technical reaction . |
| 23 | She sat on the opposite couchette and picked up the paperback he had been reading . |
| 24 | Samuel Taylor Coleridge had been reading Purchas 's His Pilgrimage after taking some opium : In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately palace , encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall , wherein are fertile Meddowes , pleasant Springs , delightful Streames , and all sorts of beasts of chase and game , and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure . |
| 25 | The pupil is 14 : the class had been reading Leon Garfield 's story . |
| 26 | He had been reading Lenin 's Imperialism : The highest stage of capitalism , and his ideological position had hardened . |
| 27 | We had been reading the poems of a Greek poet in French translation together . |
| 28 | She wondered who had been reading so recently on the carefully made bed , or if this fat book , which she now saw to be a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories , were a relic of the past summer , and the maid , or whoever cleared the house , was devotedly keeping her employer 's place . |
| 29 | Hugh , who had been reading about the dangers of having a smoker as a cohabitee , waved his handkerchief through the air and moved to the edge of the terrace . |
| 30 | He had been reading the notes of Wittgenstein , he said , who before his death had been working on the relation between the private , sensuous experience of colour and the universal language of colour words with which we appear to be able to communicate it . |