Example sentences of "was [adv] a [noun sg] [prep] " in BNC.
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| 1 | It was altogether a history of successful preservation of traditional political , social and cultural values by a conservative elite against all odds ; even Caesar 's move to punish Massalia , as the ally of Pompey , did not spell disaster . |
| 2 | ‘ We would have caught him eventually but this time it was thankfully a case of sooner rather than later . ’ |
| 3 | Historians may have drawn gender lines too sharply , but the view that apprenticeship as serious industrial training towards mastery of a craft was overwhelmingly a path for males is essentially correct . |
| 4 | The response — on the day it was revealed she was the voice on the tape — was as staggering as it was overwhelmingly a vote for the Princess . |
| 5 | How would I know this Marie Savigny was secretly a member of the de Montfort coven , who wanted to come to England to plot mischief , perhaps even murder ? |
| 6 | The contracting industry of the 1950s had not nurtured new talent or new ideas , as happened in the 1930s and 1940s , so that , apart from the Free Cinema directors , it was mostly a case of the same old people trying to make films . |
| 7 | Programmes were mostly serious ; entertainment was mostly a cartoon for children ( ‘ Sindibad and Ali Baba ’ ) which also had some following among adults ; people much enjoyed a Syrian comedy series , and owners of video-recorders would tape it , to replay it for friends and visitors . |
| 8 | With part-time farmers the lack of labour was mostly a problem for those on shift work or those who had difficulty in getting time off . |
| 9 | This was mostly a matter of scale ; Pete 's feeling was that you could n't own such a place , you could only be owned by it . |
| 10 | When Ken was in a bad mood or turned on people who regarded themselves as close friends , it was mostly a reaction to the way he saw himself — a failure to be what he wanted to be most . |
| 11 | Although I was sceptical as to the Brighton affair , I could not help seeing that there was rather a look about Mr Wilson sometimes ; for instance when , as occasionally happened , his wife 's leg was too bad for her to go shopping and he went alone . |
| 12 | As Stephen Wood points out in his Introduction to his edited book discussing the de-skilling thesis ( Wood 1982 , 15 ) , Braverman appears to assume ‘ that prior to Taylorism control was not in the hands of management , but was rather a kind of management by neglect ( the laissez-faire method , as Taylor called it ) , in which workers knew more than managers ’ . |
| 13 | It was rather a kind of oligarchy , with a strong hereditary element in its composition . |
| 14 | It was rather a façade behind which classes and individuals with a vested interest in weak and decentralized government could entrench themselves , and also a mere mechanical adherence to established practices and institutions . |
| 15 | Presently a remark of Elizabeth 's started him off on capital punishment , because it emerged that Ivy was rather a friend to hanging . |
| 16 | It was rather a squash at my nana 's house because mum , and I had to share a bedroom . |
| 17 | I knew that she would be feeling timid , and it was rather a climb in any case : comforting for her to come up a flight of steps passing a trellis of gloriously flowering wistaria . |
| 18 | Indeed , throughout the 1960s successive governments were struggling to balance the books and it was rather a case of some years being less bad than others . |
| 19 | It was rather a struggle between housing classes for access to the central scarce resource , namely suburban housing . |
| 20 | So it was rather a question of running the gauntlet when passing over the Sayers ' land . |
| 21 | His mother was rather a stranger to him , so he did n't feel the loss of her so keenly . |
| 22 | Some years ago the teachers of one language pronounced themselves satisfied that at the end of a year the students of it had the capacity for literary reading ; the equally competent and concerned teachers of another language were convinced that their students had achieved no such capacity , and that the process was rather a waste of time . |
| 23 | In the early stages we started off with perhaps Minor schools which could almost have been Major ones , because you were just trying to find any school that had got some kind of life , or interest , or things happening … really in many ways it was rather a matter of chance because of the way it happened at the time . |
| 24 | And er the rent was twenty one shillings at that time which was rather a lot for a council house so we had , had an exchange down to Street in the where the rent was about seven and six which was a big difference . |
| 25 | There was rather a lot of it , and he had enough work already , dealing with a mass transfer of pilots and ground staff . |
| 26 | The Renaissance had provided western Europe with a handsome collection of hitherto lost Greek texts , literary , philosophical and historical , to be studied by scholars , admired by the cultivated ( generally in translation ) , and imitated , in part , by contemporary writers ; but insofar as the Renaissance was actually a " rebirth " of anything past , it was predominantly a rebirth of Rome and the spirit of Rome , not of Greece ; and the remains of Greek antiquity were treated , and well into the eighteenth century continued to be treated , largely as if they belonged to some kind of extension of the now assimilated world of Rome . |
| 27 | Some Ministers felt that this was wholly a matter for the conscience or judgment of the individual , and that Ministers who held strong views on the moral issue should not be asked to subordinate those views to a collective decision of the Cabinet . |
| 28 | Ken was effectively a bishop for some five years , during which he showed great zeal for the teaching of the Catechism and the relief of the poor . |
| 29 | He described this as " grossly inadequate " and said that this was effectively a symptom of the basic unreasonableness of the contract . |
| 30 | In the first week of March , in what was effectively a coup against Negrín , a National Defence Council was created in Madrid , with the aim of negotiating an end to hostilities . |