Example sentences of "it was [conj] a [noun] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | It was but a village , and four small sailing boats , sails drooping and oars plying , moved out from a tiny wooden jetty as we moved in . |
| 2 | In a month it was forgotten ; it was but a dream , and to-day you might search in vain for the place which enthusiastic optimists averred was the cradle of a second Winnipeg . |
| 3 | Here was a face , buried in its cloud of hair , which looked more like a mask than a living thing , a mask such as might be worn on All Souls ' Eve to scare the children , all thickly white with painted black sockets for eyes and a mouth so crudely gashed it was but a slit . |
| 4 | It was but a minute , effendi . |
| 5 | All the magic had died from it , and it was but a husk of itself ; for all my art , it could tell me only one thing — that no one could restore it to its place except a child not yet born , and born only for that task . |
| 6 | And from here it was but a step to suggesting that women did not take the whole thing seriously as a profession . |
| 7 | But I remember Kielder Valley before it was flooded , when it was but a gleam in the developer 's eye ; and I remember the futile protests and the sadness of the communities who lost their homes . |
| 8 | And it should be remembered that despite a tremendous volume of criticism that heralded the Bennett appointment as the Commandant of Pathfinder Force , it was but a murmur compared with that when he was appointed AOC of No 8 ( PFF ) Group at the tender age of 31 . |
| 9 | So it was that a generation of highly educated women occupied their minds with Bowlby and Spock and The Joy Of Cooking and little else . |
| 10 | If Heydrich had a regret about life on earth — and he had never been heard to express one — it was that a day held merely twenty-four hours . |
| 11 | And so it was that a man who had tried his hand at a whole variety of working-class jobs but who was no friend of the labour unions could , as part of his episodic film Intolerance , quite effortlessly recreate a clash between workers and police that is so lifelike as to seem like a newsreel and to suggest that perhaps every subsequent labour riot followed its pattern . |
| 12 | Rain never knew how it was that a man who spoke no word of a foreign language could master the intricacies of ordering a favourite type of beer in any country on earth . |
| 13 | Lunch was taken on the terrace alone beneath the warming rays of the April sunshine , and after that she continued her exploration of the house , amazed at the number of rooms that were apparently shut up and wondering why it was that a man like Marc Alexander Vila would choose to live alone in this enormous and obviously expensive mausoleum . |
| 14 | During the long drawn out hostage crisis the American people had watched impotently , wondering how it was that a nation with the supposed military capability to wipe Russia off the map at the push of a button could do nothing . |
| 15 | The rush took me completely by surprise , and I think what contributed to it was that a lot of industry had closed down early , schools were closed , and many people had taken extended holiday . |
| 16 | At the outbreak of war Messiaen joined the army and it was whilst a prisoner in Silesia that he composed his Quatuor pour la fin du temps which combines the harmonic and rhythmic complexity with refinement of sound that characterizes his later works , notably the epic Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jésus for solo piano . |
| 17 | Dalby was held to have been decided in the way that it was because a direction was needed whether or not there was an intervening act , i.e. the words in Dalby did not mean what they said . |
| 18 | He wondered if it was because a woman 's mind worked in a different way to a man 's or whether Blanche simply thought too much . |