Example sentences of "had been [adj] [verb] [adv] " in BNC.
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| 1 | It would have been sensible to have got in touch , but she had been desperate to get back and every mile of the road from Paris had been singingly bittersweet . |
| 2 | On nationalisation around a quarter of households in Britain still lacked a supply of electricity , most of them in urban slums ( which had been uneconomic to connect either because of their short expected life or the inability of the occupants or unwillingness of their landlords to pay for internal wiring ) . |
| 3 | I was also beginning to see why Edward had been loth to speak openly about his work . |
| 4 | Oh , she had been right to turn down his offer — the affair would never have lasted the year ! |
| 5 | He had hit Milward pretty hard , thought Henry , but he had been right to do so . |
| 6 | Maybe , after all , Cadfael had been right to speak so simply of ‘ poor Columbanus ’ . |
| 7 | The Dutch might have been willing to see a world without territorial empire , if only it had been possible to keep up a trading system on that basis . |
| 8 | During 1912 many of the critics , and in particular Hourcade and Allard , had been anxious to point out that the work of the Cubists was becoming more individual and less austere and didactic . |
| 9 | But this portrait was different from either ; the wonder was that the artist who could produce this disciplined splurge of colour , this technical artistry and imagination , had been content to churn out meretricious souvenirs for the tourist trade . |
| 10 | She had been content to stand by and watch him dig his own hole with a shovel . |
| 11 | There is , needless to say , no suggestion that the Bank of England are in contempt , and , for the same reasons as have led me to conclude that the injunction is overridden , I should have had no hesitation in varying the injunction if it had been necessary to do so . |
| 12 | He had been foiled in his first attempt to reach it by the arrival of Jos , and ever since it had been impossible to get away unnoticed . |
| 13 | When pouring , it had been impossible to line up the bottles with the glasses , no matter how close she held the neck of a bottle to the rim of a glass . |
| 14 | The Maldives government also claimed the right to host the fifth summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation ( SAARC ) instead of Sri Lanka , which as current chair had been due to do so in 1989 , but which had refused owing to the continuing presence in Sri Lanka of Indian troops [ see also p. 37357 ] . |
| 15 | Mesic had been due to take up office on May 15 , under the system of rotating leadership , but Serbia , Vojvodina and Bosnia Hercegovina blocked his appointment , thus precipitating a constitutional deadlock . |
| 16 | Lynda , a former teacher who has worked as a deaconess in Ayrshire , Edinburgh and Fort William and whose most recent church appointment was a centre warden at Iona Abbey , had been due to take over the lease of Key House , next to Falkland Palace , in July but the property became vacant sooner than expected . |
| 17 | Tim and Sophie had been due to fly out to meet Julie and Elizabeth within a few days . |
| 18 | She was godmother to Julie 's 23-month-old daughter Sophie and Mr Godwin and Sophie had been due to fly out to join the group on Friday . |
| 19 | On the day her contract had been due to run out , 15 February , she had been offered a job as an enrolled nurse at Grantham . |
| 20 | Jasper had complained , had got chilblains , but even he had put up with it ; yet that was one of the reasons why he had been pleased to move in to live with her mother 's warmth , after a cold winter . |
| 21 | A bachelor with a sister as housekeeper , he had found retirement unstimulating , and had been pleased to come back to teaching at any price , any place . |
| 22 | From the outset he had been dismayed to learn how little they 'd progressed . |
| 23 | She sat down awkwardly on one of the chairs , feeling highly incongruous in her black dress , which she had been obliged to put back on that morning , and looked down at her stiletto-clad feet . |
| 24 | And so the poor man had been obliged to die in as Christian a manner as possible in the arms of the atheistical Magistrate who had , of course , listened without the least sympathy to Mr Bradley 's last pious ejaculations , impatiently muttering : " Yes , yes , to be sure , do n't worry about it , " as poor Mr Bradley , looking up into that last , glaring , free-thinking , diabolical , ginger sunset of the Magistrate 's whiskers , commended his soul to God . |
| 25 | By 20 July Wolfgang was writing to Leopold that he had been obliged to move out of the Weber 's house and find different lodgings , since ‘ people were gossiping ’ . |
| 26 | In 1953 , Princess Margaret had been obliged to call off her relationship with the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend on the advice of the prime minister and the Queen 's private secretary . |
| 27 | Well , all those things had gone in the parcels , parcels that Kathleen had been obliged to carry down to the post office in five separate journeys , parcels that were heavy and had cost altogether two pounds four shillings to send . |
| 28 | And what pride she had , that transcended her meagre purse and the threadbare pelisse that so little kept out the winter cold that she still wore it inside the house , and had been obliged to come down from her room to seek a little warmth from the dying fire . |
| 29 | There were many more ardent Communists , but ever since the twenties they had been obliged to keep very quiet indeed . |
| 30 | Charlotte made to reply , but suddenly felt exasperated and wearied by the hoops she had been obliged to jump through . |