Example sentences of "had [been] [to-vb] [adj] [noun sg] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | Neville had been to see Private Eye , and its staff had been courteous , but faintly aloof . |
| 2 | Set up in 1979 [ see p. 29817 ] , the primary aim of the SADCC had been to counter economic destabilization by , and regional dependence on , apartheid South Africa . |
| 3 | Prior to this Act the traditional approach of central government had been to view local expenditure in global terms ; hence , as long as local government spending as a whole remained on target , individual authorities spending above the norm were not penalized . |
| 4 | Engineers , whose prime objective had been to maximise net revenue , originally had put forward four proposals for the upgrading of the junction , all of which would have made the head-on collision of two trains on a single-track section of line outside the station impossible . |
| 5 | This new building was no doubt excellent of its kind , but if the intention had been to express confident authority tempered by humanity he was n't sure that the architect had succeeded . |
| 6 | Until that time the convention in painting nudes had been to omit pubic hair altogether . |
| 7 | The original purpose of the allies in Japan , following the Japanese surrender in August 1945 , had been to reform Japanese society so as to eliminate the aggressive , militaristic character of Japanese government , which had largely explained the growth of the Japanese empire between 1894 and 1943 . |
| 8 | ( The original idea had been to synchronise German unification with the single market , implementing both in 1993 . |