Example sentences of "had [be] a [adj] [noun] " in BNC.

  Next page
No Sentence
1 The following morning , in her pigeonhole at the theatre , had been a sealed envelope .
2 Time was now important to him : it had been a lazy year and , as he had told Levy , there was still work for him to do .
3 A bomb exploded outside the house of Prime Minister Haidar Abu Bakr al-Attas in Sana'a on May 15 ; on the night of May 9-10 there had been a similar explosion outside the home of Salim Salih Mohammed , a member of Yemen 's provisional Presidential Council and of the Yemen Socialist Party leadership .
4 There had been a similar holder and brass chain in the parish room of his father 's Norfolk church but he could n't remember seeing one since .
5 Mr Armstrong said there had been a similar incident last year when Mr Bowler had been stabbed but refused to make a statement to the police .
6 There had been a similar car outside the school …
7 Why was there no comprehensive management plan , considering there had been a similar flood in 1990 ?
8 Churchill had been a hundred miles from London , weekending in the country .
9 What , then , of life and death in a typical Victorian family , compared with the way things had been a hundred years previously ?
10 She had been a clerk-receptionist phone-answerer-teamaker and she had got the job through her uncle Bob who was as near to being a friend of Thomas Walby 's as it was possible to be .
11 It had been a narrow escape and I was impressed .
12 Thurmaston had been a typical Leicestershire village with all its farmhouses and cottages clustered together and surrounded by its huge open fields until the enclosure award of 1763 .
13 A selection of such writings appeared posthumously as Essays in Jewish History ( 1934 ) under the auspices of the Jewish Historical Society of England , of which he had been a principal founder .
14 To make the most of beneficial planetary influences had been a principal object of Marsilio Ficino ( 1433–99 ) , one of the first scholars to give the practice of magic the semblance of respectability .
15 Describing 1989 as ‘ a fantastic year for freedom ’ , Mrs Thatcher said 1979 had been a turning point in history and Conservatives were the pathfinders .
16 The long birdie putt Beck had earlier holed for an eagle three at the 13th had been a turning point , but for Norman , who does not normally play the week before the Masters , this must have also given him encouragement .
17 Whatever it was , she knew that the occasion had been a turning point in her feelings towards Liza .
18 Where he had been standing had been a turning point for cars once upon a time — when there were still cars in the world — but this had never been a place for modern things .
19 If Wordsworth had been a simple country boy , they could have patronized him ; the Johnsonian style of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads showed that he could write like the gentlemanly reviewers if he wanted to , and nothing is more infuriating than one of our own sort who ‘ lets the side down ’ .
20 It had been a simple matter after that to slip down to Mike Quinn , who was an acknowledged authority on all aspects of the disease by virtue of his ownership of one book , and borrow his Encyclopaedia of Human Ailments .
21 oh I came , came to several conclusions , erm , one , one of the problems that the article faced me with , if it had been a simple outburst , if , if the , the Daily Telegraph had simply taken an advert out as opposed to maybe editorials then I may of had less a problem , because the problem with editorials is that they are believed , companies adverts are n't believed , well they 're partially believed , but an editorial carries a lot more weight and therefore when it 's written like that it tends to strike home much harder , therefore that , my immediate thoughts were that if were going to react , if we were going to find a way of cantering the problems we felt this had created , then we would not have to follow any normal course of action , we simply could n't put an advert out because nobody would have believed it , we would have to look at it a different way of actually cantering and that 's part of the reason for the time taking to think it through .
22 World War I had been a desperate see-saw battle up till its closing days .
23 The pause , the question , had been a mere formality , the token request for permission men used to cover themselves against a variety of possible future accusations .
24 Some expanding cities were the creations of the new era ; Yokohama had been a mere fishing village in 1853 , and Kobe , too , owed its expansion to foreign trade .
25 By pre-arrangement the debate was limited to foreign and defence matters , which Mr Ford considered his strong suit because he had been a congressman and a vice-president while his opponent , Jimmy Carter , had been a mere governor of Georgia and a peanut farmer .
26 It had been a mere moment of whiteness seen out of the corner of her eye but it had not moved purposefully like a horse does with a rider .
27 ‘ He wished to make it clear for the purposes of this case that there had been a genuine company in Bombay called Rasiklal & Sons , ’ Dutta told Snaresbrook Crown Court .
28 Furthermore , it might be argued from Case 131/86 United Kingdom v. Council , where the Court looked at the preparatory measures to the legislation in question in order to determine whether it was genuinely intended to be agricultural legislation , that the Court might investigate whether there had been a genuine consideration of the question of subsidiarity .
29 Between 1929 and the formation of the second National Government after the general election , the Liberal party had been a genuine participant in the political system and the other parties had to consider carefully what its reactions might be .
30 It had been a rough race and Kelly had been glad that she had elected to be among the leaders throughout .
  Next page