Example sentences of "had [been] [v-ing] [art] [adj] " in BNC.

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1 Mr Butler had been taking a collection-box home when he was attacked on the Tube , kicked in the face , kneed in the stomach , had his head banged against a door and almost strangled .
2 The other women often talked about young men they knew , and one of them had been taking a young man back to her flat during the evenings .
3 Kochen maintained that DEC had been taking a worldwide census of ‘ hundreds of customers ’ recently to ascertain whether OSF/1-on-MIPS was a viable policy .
4 Susan had been taking a few items of clothing from a chest of drawers to a suitcase open on the bed .
5 Reuben Boll had been taking the last part of his annual leave .
6 He had been serving a 20-year term in Nicosia 's central prison .
7 However , now that the papers had been reporting the recent news of her husband 's return from Australia — apparently determined to impress his name and tough personality on the City of London — it was obviously about time that she came to a decision about her future .
8 All through the first part of the interview — the crazy part , when she had been talking about seeing her son in the house — Hank had been telling the straight truth .
9 The headmistress and the governors of the school named were justly irate , for , they stated with concerted vehemence , no child had witnessed the recovery of the body of a murder victim from the canal : those children who had not been making stegosauruses out of old egg boxes had been learning an Ashanti war dance , and not one had been in the playground , which was the only vantage point from which body recovery would be observable .
10 Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Berdennikov said on Sept. 14 that the Soviet Union and later Russia had been violating a 1972 treaty banning germ warfare , at least until March 1992 .
11 I had been swimming a long time that first Sunday , far out in the bay , and he could easily have slipped the things on to the Bourani end of the beach while I was in the water .
12 ‘ Hello , love , ’ said her father , coming in from the kitchen where he had been shelling the succulent fresh prawns that would form part of a cold seafood and salad lunch , before the hot turkey dinner this evening .
13 Reading it , the British discovered that they had been speaking the imperial equivalent of prose all their lives .
14 It was later compounded by the fall-out from a family explosion : on Roger Ackerley 's death in 1929 the son discovered that , first , his father had been maintaining a separate menage and that , second , the money had run out .
15 All the while , Julian Bailey had been maintaining a strong , gritty pursuit with the Nissan , and he was only 7secs behind Baldi 's second-placed Mercedes when he made his fuel stop early on lap 31 .
16 At the direction of his lance master , he had been patrolling the ancient forest of Haling Heart , south of Scaraby , for three seasons and had found no quests with which to occupy himself , never mind accrue funds for the order .
17 The miners had been seeking a 25 per cent pay increase , but the mine faced an uncertain future , with reserves expected to run out by 1996 .
18 He had been using a great deal of unnecessary and inappropriate tension when reciting .
19 Their G P Felix Lusman had been using a faulty technique for the past five years .
20 Rauschning also began to realise that Gauleiter Forster had been using the economic reforms initiated by the Party in 1933 to line his own pocket .
21 John Rodwell , a specialist inspector from the Health and Safety Executive , said it appeared Mr Eaton had been using the burning torch to cut at the edge of the slot at one end of the pipe trying to open it and hot gases could have caused it to become dislodged and fall .
22 His case was that he had been using the public lavatory for proper purposes when the the police burst into his cubicle and arrested him , and that he had had no contact of any kind with the co-defendant .
23 He had been using an ingenious method .
24 She did not confirm for them that she had been meeting an escaped prisoner and she did not explain the significance of the print-out , but they clearly knew the first and it would be only a short time before they worked out the second .
25 For a while I had been ringing the Lost Property office at Queen Street station each week , still pathetically hoping that the bag with Uncle Rory 's poems and Darren Watt 's Möbius scarf would somehow miraculously turn up again .
26 In March 1990 , Miklos Nemeth , then Prime Minister , alleged during a parliamentary debate on the January 1990 Danubegate scandal [ see p. 37194 ] that former leaders of the HSWP with the help of the hard-line Czechoslovak and Romanian regimes had been plotting an armed takeover of power in Hungary in the summer of 1989 .
27 For this search I teamed up with two young friends , both experienced detector users , who had been searching a nearby farm and thus knew the area well .
28 Three navy helicopters had been searching the Manx coastline where the Gloucester had been moored , and where the two radio operators were last seen .
29 Ever since the two disastrous meetings she had had recently about Matilda , the first with the Headmistress and the second with the dreadful Mr and Mrs Wormwood , Miss Honey had been thinking a great deal about this child and wondering how she could help her .
30 Newley had been wearing a black , loosely knitted jersey , which was why Dougal had not noticed the wounds earlier .
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