Example sentences of "he [was/were] [v-ing] the [adj] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Tenderly he touched her , kissed her lips , not with passion now , but with a delicate reverence , as if he were kissing the fragile bloom of a rare flower . |
| 2 | Dad started off in statesman-like fashion , as if he were addressing the United Nations , earnestly saying he 'd come to love Eva over the time he 'd known her and so on . |
| 3 | He was scanning the smoky room , fidgeting a little nervously . |
| 4 | He was experiencing the limited pleasures and drawbacks of early manhood . |
| 5 | He was tormenting the thin man . |
| 6 | He was learning the whole time , today one thing , tomorrow another , this year well , next year better . " |
| 7 | Chaca had even spray painted his tag ‘ Chaca ’ on the inside of the lift as he was leaving the criminal court building after being convicted of defacing public property . |
| 8 | De Klerk 's predecessor as State President and leader of the NP , P. W. Botha [ for whose resignation from these posts in 1989 see pp. 36453 , 36837 ] , made known on May 6 that he was leaving the National Party and accused de Klerk of taking " the path of abdication " . |
| 9 | Helaf Orbis Ali resigned as Minister of Labour on Aug. 26 and announced that he was leaving the ruling Popular Rally for Progress ( RPP ) to join the United Opposition Front ( UOF ) — an umbrella group including members of the parliamentary opposition and the opposition guerrilla Front for the Restoration of Unity and Democracy ( FRUD ) . |
| 10 | Lloyd George might think that in beating Wilson over the space requirements of Asiatics in the debate over the Merchant Shipping Act in 1906 he was delivering the working classes from their unworthy prejudices against foreign seamen , but the seamen thought that they knew better . |
| 11 | He was accompanying the chief executive of BP Exploration , John Browne , on a trip to the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan where BP and Statoil are discussing offshore developments in the South Caspian Sea with the Azeri government . |
| 12 | Conventional Hollywood thinking in the late 1930s was summed up a few years later by Raymond Moley when he was discussing the general ethics of the Production Code . |
| 13 | Alun Evans , secretary of the Welsh football association who doubles up as chairman of the UAU committee , said : ‘ I was informed by the chairman of the UAU rugby committee that he was discussing the possible sponsorship of its championship and I received a copy of a proposal … it contained a number of features which were not acceptable to the union and it was therefore with great surprise that we learned a launch for the sponsorship had been called and it was decided that the union could not agree to this action . ’ |
| 14 | He was off the road on a forest track , little-used and thick with dead leaves , and he was watching the failing light through the branches of the trees overhead . |
| 15 | He was watching the circling helicopters . |
| 16 | THE Michael Knighton Story , already sold to a tabloid , began publicly as recently as 18 August when it became known that he was buying the controlling interest in Manchester United from Martin Edwards . |
| 17 | He was eyeing the young woman as if she were a — well , a confectionery shop . |
| 18 | He was breaking the French stick , his eyes roving dispassionately over her scantily clad body , and she felt herself blush . |
| 19 | In his own Board , Melling was none the less able to pursue an off-peak pricing policy , despite criticism from the other chairmen that he was breaking the common front against Ministry interference on pricing . |
| 20 | And then , even while she was making valiant efforts to control herself , because for certain he was going to set about strangling her at any moment , after some seconds of looking at her as if staggered , suddenly , and to her amazement , he was seeing the funny side of it also — and he was laughing too ! |
| 21 | Zen seemed to see again that glare of hostility and hear the Questore murmur , ‘ Until today he was handling the Miletti case for us . ’ |
| 22 | ‘ Until today he was handling the Miletti case for us . ’ |
| 23 | He was conducting the whole affair with a model of the war zone with cardboard tanks and national flags to identify the blocks of combatants . |
| 24 | He was conducting the whole thing , with a minimum of gesture : a sort of schoolboy Adrian Boult . |
| 25 | He was using the middle classes as a reference group ; aspiring to what he believed to be their values of ‘ honour ’ and ‘ duty ’ . |
| 26 | In fact he was using the Parsons-White string bender , the one where you pushed down the neck of the guitar and that moved a mechanism which raised the B-string by a tone , but I did n't have a clue about that . |
| 27 | Yeah that 's cos he was using the allen key . |
| 28 | He was using the cordless phone she and David had bought him last Christmas . |
| 29 | They closed on the knife blade , twisted it out of the man 's hand , and then he was using the whole false arm as a metal club slamming down on the upraised arms , jabbing for the face , forcing the man back step by step until the edge of the track was only one more step away . |
| 30 | For the moment , anyway , he was using the old methods on the 7 December dummy . |