Example sentences of "had been [v-ing] a [adj] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 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 | He had been serving a 20-year term in Nicosia 's central prison . |
| 5 | 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 . |
| 6 | 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 . |
| 7 | 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 . |
| 8 | 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 . |
| 9 | He had been using a great deal of unnecessary and inappropriate tension when reciting . |
| 10 | Their G P Felix Lusman had been using a faulty technique for the past five years . |
| 11 | He had been using an ingenious method . |
| 12 | 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 . |
| 13 | 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 . |
| 14 | 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 . |
| 15 | 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 . |
| 16 | Newley had been wearing a black , loosely knitted jersey , which was why Dougal had not noticed the wounds earlier . |
| 17 | He had been wearing a blue sweatshirt over his T-shirt , which he had taken off after the pub fight broke out . |
| 18 | The girl , who will be seven next month , told the High Court in Glasgow that her grandfather had been wearing a red nose and had been dressed like a clown at the time . |
| 19 | She had been wearing a light cotton shirt with a dark blue skirt . |
| 20 | Husband had been filling a curved briar from a silver pocket box . |
| 21 | I was sure she had been holding a small phial with the letters ‘ SUL ’ written on it . |
| 22 | So , Mavis at least had been getting a good earful . |
| 23 | Perhaps she 'd heard on the college grapevine that Barney had been getting an undue amount of visits from the police and was rejoicing that the heat was off her beloved Rodney . |
| 24 | Meanwhile the warden 's cat , who had been enjoying a light snack in the dustbin , saw Emily , saw the milk , and that is all I can remember , it happened so quickly . |
| 25 | During the last week of September that year , Cornwall had been enjoying an Indian summer and Edna and Celia had been down to the Cove every day . |
| 26 | Especially since by then Laura had been earning a great deal of money , and all the past difficulties had more or less been solved . |
| 27 | However , as was pointed out by the Court of Appeal in Coward v Comex Houlder Diving Ltd ( 1988 ) ( reported in Kemp & Kemp , Section M , para27-322 ) the conventional percentage does not necessarily apply where the wife had been earning a considerable sum herself prior to her husband 's death or presumably where she had a substantial private income : see also Davies v Hawes ( 1990 ) reported in Kemp & Kemp , Section M , para27-323 . |
| 28 | At least the Spanish authorities had been conducting a professional search . |
| 29 | She and Implexion had been conducting a casual affair for years ; she knew him better than anyone . |
| 30 | He turned out to be an inspector of taxes with whom I had been conducting a mini back-duty enquiry and which was in the concluding stages . |