Example sentences of "had been [v-ing] [adv] for " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | Despite all the money the Politicals had been siphoning off for years , a very sore point with the rest of us , they claimed to have no material on the terrorists beyond a few isolated descriptions and photographs . |
| 2 | The expediter — ‘ Joy ’ — was the envoy of a client of mine : the Construction and Development Corporation of the Philippines ( CDCP ) , a local company my bank had been courting unsuccessfully for years . |
| 3 | We had been looking around for about five minutes or so , when a jeep containing two members of the Guardia Civil ( The National Police ) arrived . |
| 4 | Mr Fitzpatrick had been looking forward for months to the holiday with his son , who attended business meetings in the US capital . |
| 5 | Mr Fitzpatrick had been looking forward for months to a holiday in the States with his son . |
| 6 | The Sikhs , ignoring him , had been digging steadily for hours ; now they were beginning to shovel up wet earth . |
| 7 | Searle was not the only person at this time to conclude that since the Lefevre Gallery had told Minton ‘ Moons are out ’ , he had been searching round for new solutions which visits abroad solved only temporarily . |
| 8 | Englishmen had been settling overseas for a century and a half but their colonies had been inhabited by people who , apart from the slaves who got no choice in the matter , had no particular difficulty in committing themselves to being loyal to King George : Englishmen , Scotsmen , Irishmen , or Germans would accept the King without question , and the Dutch of New York and the Acadians of Nova Scotia were almost the only people who had ever been asked to make a serious change of allegiance , which had been harder for the Acadians because of religious differences . |
| 9 | Toleration as wide-ranging as this would not have been acceptable in England , where hostility to Roman Catholicism had been building up for seventy years since Mary Tudor 's attempt to wipe out Protestantism . |
| 10 | Mr Devi Lal , for example , who had been lobbying hard for the home ministry to add to his deputy premiership , had to content himself with the agriculture ministry . |
| 11 | Obviously Stirling had been lobbying hard for new blood . |
| 12 | The English had been fishing there for over a century , and had been settled for over fifty years , so they had a strong position for making the French give up any claims to settle there . |
| 13 | Overhead the clouds had been breaking up for some time . |
| 14 | Following township rumours that the Mandelas had been living apart for some weeks , the Sowetan newspaper said Mrs Mandela continued to live in the mansion she had built in a better part of Soweto but Mr Mandela had moved into a well-guarded home in Johannesburg 's affluent northern suburbs . |
| 15 | Pamela and he had been living together for a while and , until recently , Jimmy had been close to a happiness previously denied him ; both as lover and as surrogate father . |
| 16 | Reveille for the remainder was at 0600 , as the transit camp we had been living in for the fortnight had to be handed over to the next inhabitants spick and span . |
| 17 | The ovoid seemed to project a kind of deadly aura and , as Rostov compared the black egg shape with his memory of the framework structures which he had encountered previously , he wondered if the designers had been striving consciously for the visual effect which they had achieved . |
| 18 | He had been trembling violently for several hours but now no sound came from the place where he lay . |
| 19 | You might say that this thing had been brewing up for a long time , that the threat was there ; they had n't seen it . |
| 20 | His tenure of the post was short : his health had been declining progressively for several months as a result of overwork , and he died 5 February 1882 at his home at 7 Cornwall Street , Edinburgh . |
| 21 | By this time , Lou and Charlie had moved too — the business had been running down for a long period and there was no point in staying in a flat over a shop that did n't exist any more . |
| 22 | He knew this was something that had been happening slowly for a long time , something that had to happen or he was lost , but it was such a brittle structure they were building , one word would topple it , shatter it , one word would be enough to jerk them back into that ordinary daylight where nothing could be changed or righted , nothing could unravel . |
| 23 | He had carried her in his arms as naturally as if he had been doing so for years , and she had felt right there . |
| 24 | It was n't that long ago that John Hurt was drinking heavily , and had been doing so for years . |
| 25 | Bodie was making eyes at the girl , and had been doing so for most of the hearing . |
| 26 | This was partly because Picasso , like Braque , was at this time working largely from memory ; indeed he had been doing so for the past three years . |
| 27 | They said yes , Andrus did come on Fridays and had been doing so for years . |
| 28 | However , the FoE did welcome a number of proposals they had been campaigning on for some time . |
| 29 | It was as if he had been waiting there for me all my life . |
| 30 | Toby Tobias was quickest away and Desert Orchid could find no more , but the race was far from finished , for as Mark Pitman on Toby Tobias made for the winning post Graham McCourt urged Norton 's Coin to a final effort , and as the two jockeys , whips swishing , pushed their courageous mounts up the hill the cheers from the stands which moments before had been tuning up for another Dessie triumph lapsed into a disbelieving murmur : this was not the right script at all . |