Example sentences of "had [been] [to-vb] a [noun sg] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | I suppose I had been given a sense of the evil of cinema by my strict Methodist grandparents , who were visibly shocked when once I confessed that I had been to see a film on Sunday . |
| 2 | He had been to see a palmist and shown him her photo . |
| 3 | Why they were as they were , and what kind of man her great-great-great-grandfather had been to create a place like this . |
| 4 | In establishing a Peace Council the aim had been to create a body composed of representatives of associations , political parties , the private sector and the government to design a new peace strategy . |
| 5 | The mission had been to penetrate a terrorist base in Libya and eliminate all personnel , which included Salim Al-Makesh , an advisor to the Black June , a movement founded by Abu Nidal in I976 in protest at the involvement of Syria in the Lebanese civil war , and Jean-Jacques Bernard , a senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine . |
| 6 | His first experience in magic had been to give a show at the Miners Welfare hall at the age of 11 . |
| 7 | Her brief had been to visit a number of Northern provincial collections and select works that would fit neatly within her chosen theme . |
| 8 | Mr Bradford , who lived with his four brothers in Western Road , Brentwood , had been to visit a girlfriend the previous evening . |
| 9 | The Teutonic Knights had indeed penetrated eastwards , but their influence , when it was not military , had been to spread a lifestyle and set of material , cultural and linguistic bearings rather than set in motion the bodily removal and resettlement of vast numbers of Germans . |
| 10 | Arguments of this sort which confused the " lower sorts of men " with the " higher sorts of ape " were not simply exercises in increasingly refined scientific discrimination ; they were closely meshed in with an ongoing dialectical debate , the original purpose of which had been to establish a synthesis between the theological doctrine of the Fall and the newly discovered facts of human geography . |
| 11 | He thought of his dam that had been to make a lake . |
| 12 | In an end-of-year assessment at Westminster , Mr Ashdown admitted that when he became leader , his job had been to stabilise a party ‘ in a fast downward spiral of disintegration ’ . |
| 13 | If the objective of his policy had been to maintain a balance of power by opposing the strongest nation in Europe , he was no doubt picking the wrong enemy ; France was the rising power , and later in the century English policy was devoted to holding her in check . |
| 14 | The initial objective of the ITE initiative had been to encourage a reorientation of the work supported by ITAB into avenues of relevance to the engineering community , using the existing committee structure as far as possible . |
| 15 | She walked on , wondering whose decision it had been to buy a retirement home in such an isolated spot . |
| 16 | I recall that two years ago at the NFT he announced that his great ambition as a young man had been to become a movie director : now ( aided by director of photography William Lubtchansky and production designer Chloe Obolensky ) he has made a landmark television film . |