Example sentences of "was [adv] [adj] a [noun sg] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | He 'd been a uniformed inspector with the Soho Unit for nearly three years , and was probably due for a move ; no sign of it yet , but there was most likely a memo waiting deep in the machinery , easing its way out at the speed of a splinter . |
| 2 | ’ His ‘ instant portrait ’ — on the accuracy of which he prided himself enormously — was that the client was most likely a starter , could very well be a married man , children off his hands , time on his hands , going back to his own public school days ( the velvet collar on the overcoat was a giveaway ) and the boys will be boys bit or just realized very late that what he really fancied was a bit of the other and had to wallet to get it . |
| 3 | He 'd decided he was most likely an agronomist attached to an Antarctic survey team . |
| 4 | The fact that Paris was so rich a source of books — from de luxe manuscripts to ‘ soiled tracts and battered codices ’ — in part stemmed from its position and reputation as the greatest northern European centre of learning . |
| 5 | The end result was so close a finish that , for the moment , the result is being declared a dead heat with birds recording a velocity of 1173 . |
| 6 | His employer , Oscar Godolphin , was one of the eleven to whom the flame of Roxborough 's intent had been passed , though of all of them surely none was so perfect a hypocrite as Godolphin , who was both a member of a Society committed to the repression of all magical activity , and the employer ( Godolphin would have said owner ) of a creature summoned by magic in the very year of the tragedy that had brought the Society into being . |
| 7 | Alcuin [ q.v. ] says that Offa shed much blood to secure Ecgfrith 's position , and if this refers to a purge of the royal kindred may explain why Cenwulf was so distant a relative . |
| 8 | To share in it was so distinctive a mark of membership that , in time of persecution in the second and third centuries , pieces of the consecrated bread were taken round to baptized believers languishing in prison or on a sickbed . |
| 9 | This was clear in ‘ Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme ’ , which was so memorable a success at our 1985 Festival . |
| 10 | Cromer dominated Egypt , not because England gave him force , or because Egypt loved us , but because he was so good a man . ’ |
| 11 | Irwin had triumphed because , as Lawrence had said of Cromer , ‘ he was so good a man ’ . |
| 12 | Hitcham , furthermore , which contained only seven taxpayers , was so insignificant a place it was surveyed jointly with Dorney , and we can readily imagine the constable becoming confused and forgetting to insert the name of the juvenile lord of the smaller township ; anyone subsequently checking the certificate could be forgiven for failing to realise that the first line referred to the lord of Dorney only . |
| 13 | As it was so worthwhile a visit , we would like to know where the largest Aquarium is — can you help please ? |
| 14 | During the hundred fifty years in question , there was so great a diversity of views about nature that , on closer inspection , it becomes difficult to achieve a succinct characterization . |
| 15 | With the proliferation of puritan sects during the 1640s and 1650s , there was so great a range of extreme demands , from the nationalization of land to the emancipation of women , that it would be surprising if the natural philosophers had not begun to appear as moderates . |
| 16 | Yet it was so great a task that only Zeus , chief of the gods , could master it . |
| 17 | He would swing from a despairing belief that he was so great a sinner that it was too late to hope to go to Heaven , to elation as he overcame his great vice of swearing and started to read the Bible . |
| 18 | Marx 's son-in-law Edward Aveling was so great an enthusiast that his death was noted in Wisden , and nearer to our own times C.L.R. James attained guru status to West Indian followers of both Leon Trotsky and George Headley . |
| 19 | All these reasons serve to explain why this study concentrates mainly upon the attitudes to death that prevailed in the middle-class , whose irresistible rise was so prominent a feature of the nineteenth century . |
| 20 | But in performing their tasks all both reflected and further promoted the territorialization of power which was so prominent a feature of the eleventh century political scene . |
| 21 | This was the normal relaxation of a king 's leisure : Henry I of Germany was so keen a huntsman that he ‘ would take forty or more wild beasts in a day ’ ; the Norman kings turned a substantial proportion of their kingdom into game preserves ; hunting was the natural sport of a militant aristocracy , venting on animals the energy and spleen left over from fighting their own kind . |
| 22 | He was so strong a character — and he meant so much to me — that although it 's many many years since I worked with him , he was in a way always there — it has been a strength in reserve — that there was Basil if you needed him . |
| 23 | It was so dark a blue as to be almost black , with button-down cuffs and epaulettes and a broad welt that fastened around his hips with a buckle . |
| 24 | ‘ You know , you ca n't believe she 's the same child that was so polite a couple of years ago . |
| 25 | This was so serious a threat to their efficiency , especially in wartime , that officers and NCOs had to spend much of their energies in checking and forestalling possible efforts by their men to desert . |
| 26 | But Welsh and English alike took care to put their valuables and their armour , if they had any , safely under lock and key , for if the returning troops were to be billeted in the town , even for a few nights , there would certainly be some looting , and no sane burgess was so loyal a king 's man as to be complacent about losing goods and gear without a struggle to preserve them . |
| 27 | Political management in a county setting was conducted by different methods from the outright bribery which was so significant a tool of burgh politicians . |
| 28 | Many were sold to raise funds for Henry 's wars , but some went as gifts to royal favourites , to strengthen the bond between monarch and greater subjects which was so important a part of the Tudor mystique and popularity . |
| 29 | Now Darwin got from this this idea that somehow sudden things are miraculous , are natural , erm but admittedly they may happen but I mean there is a miraculous element about sudden things , whereas things that are natural should happen gradually , and he retained this view in spite of changing his ideas about all sorts of other things , and let us now see why the gradualism was so important a component of his theory of evolution . |
| 30 | Eye surgeons had learned to cut the ligament with complete success , but it was so different a procedure from the rest of the operation and so incompatible with it that they often dreaded it . |