Example sentences of "had [been] [verb] [adv] [det] " in BNC.
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| 1 | Perhaps she had been taking too little care , or perhaps it was the strain of the bereavement coming out in physical symptoms . |
| 2 | It amazed me to think that even though the gay bar had been situated up those dark stairs for many years , the straight men downstairs managed to keep up the impetus so that no queen should pass without an insult . |
| 3 | A police officer told the coroner he 'd found youths on the site at least six times since the fence had been erected earlier this year . |
| 4 | What a fool he had been to waste so much time being " poetic " and not eating . |
| 5 | The Luna Café on Soviet Boulevard faces the gardens and the old Liberation monument that had been built there several régimes back and — so it is said — was something of a milestone in municipal graft . |
| 6 | Her make-up had been applied thickly that morning but with great dexterity . |
| 7 | ‘ In the concreted yard at the back of the flats at Water Eaton Road stood a light-weight , rubber-wheeled , aluminium wheelbarrow which one of the maintenance men had been using earlier that day . |
| 8 | She was on her own : Dr Neil had been called out some time ago to attend a woman in childbirth , and Matey had gone to visit an old friend in St John 's Wood , and she was the sole mistress of the doctor 's house in Vetch Street . |
| 9 | Perhaps Dorothy had been shielded too much , and again in her marriage she had been protected , so that there had been nothing in her life to prepare her for what was happening now . |
| 10 | If so , what was this creature , that had stood before him naked and singular , but concealed multitudes ? ; this power Chant had said possessed no friends ( it has only ADORERS AND UNDOERS , he 'd written ) and had been done as much harm in these dealings ( again , Chant 's words ) as Estabrook , to whom Chant had offered his contrition and his prayers ? |
| 11 | Beth had been surprised to know that Cissie herself had been thinking along those very same lines , and it only told her that she was right about Maisie 's children — they were growing up fast . |
| 12 | In fact , she had been thinking along those lines herself . |
| 13 | It lent to his words an air of impressive finality , as if he had been thinking out each point for the first time and had come to a halt . |
| 14 | But on the North American mainland , colonies had been affected very little by the earlier wars among European countries ; except for the brief clash that had led to the Dutch loss of New Amsterdam the colonies had fought only with ill-armed Indians and had won their little wars without help from England . |
| 15 | On Saturday , he had been tied up all day in the stable , but had taken a walk round the Broad over the lunch hour . |
| 16 | On the eve of her seventh birthday , Nanny told Artemis that she had been invited downstairs that very afternoon to take tea with her father . |
| 17 | It had been noted previously that certain phonological features characteristic of West Belfast where both Clonard and Andersonstown were located were also characteristic of the mid-Ulster dialect spoken in Lurgan ( as opposed to the Ulster-Scots dialect of Belfast 's northern and eastern hinterland ) . |
| 18 | He had been given so many things to digest , not the least that it was possible Celia might have a father still living . |
| 19 | At the back of his mind was the fear that he had been given too much air , that his lungs could not sustain the pressure , that they would collapse as Commander Barnwell 's had collapsed . |
| 20 | Their only concern was that , in the darkness , one , or more , of the ropes had been loosened too much and it would be noticed when they emerged from the back of the van . |
| 21 | The beer he had been drinking steadily all day was now weighing heavily on his stomach . |
| 22 | Hindley Earnshaw should have been at Catherine 's burial yesterday , but he had been drinking so much that he could n't go . |
| 23 | The party set off downstream along the river bank and Rostov concentrated on making it look as if he had been riding bareback all his life . |
| 24 | Maureen had been comforted as much by Joe 's loving concern for her as by his words . |
| 25 | The magazine had been consuming too much of his time even though , ideally , he ought to have been devoting more to it . |
| 26 | Yavlinsky refused Gorbachev 's invitation to the G-7 summit because , he claimed , his programme had been weakened too much to make it viable . |
| 27 | So it was only in the nineteenth century when all the loopholes had been stopped up that marriage became in fact what it had always been in theory , indissoluble . |
| 28 | He had been saving as much as possible from the grant in the hope of amassing a small sum which would tide him over until he could find a local job . |
| 29 | The pressure which had been building up all weekend was nearing some sort of explosion . |
| 30 | There was no covert there larger than an acre or two and they had been placed as much for their scenic effect as for their game-preserving role . |