Example sentences of "they had [be] [verb] the " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | After they had been given the coq au vin the waiter shovelled on to their plates , from a mysteriously divided dish , some wilted vegetables , and Richard recognised that tile moment had come to make his only point . |
| 2 | The rooks and crows which lived in the decaying stumps of the castle 's high towers could talk ; they had been given the voices of Quiss and Ajayi 's respective rivals , unfaithful lovers and hated superiors . |
| 3 | Reading it , the British discovered that they had been speaking the imperial equivalent of prose all their lives . |
| 4 | Since about 1840 they had been expanding the scope of their products to include the whole range of cotton-processing machinery . |
| 5 | On the other hand , two large specimens of Pinus halepensis , the Aleppo pine , had escaped because , he imagined , they had been transplanted the previous year making no shoots that summer , thus faring better than other plants with tender new growth . |
| 6 | ‘ Did you want me , Myra ? ’ she asked as calmly as if they had been discussing the weather and not within an ace of making either love or war . |
| 7 | ‘ They had been discussing the idea that a pet should be for life not just for Christmas and decided to take the idea a step further , ’ she said . |
| 8 | Whilst they had been watching the protesters , a waitress had come out of The Crossed Keys hotel on the corner of the square carrying a tray of interesting-looking glasses . |
| 9 | On one occasion after they had been to see the film Odd Man Out , thick fog prevented Bobby returning home to Blackheath . |
| 10 | As the boats began to leave the mouth of the River Tees , where they had been barring the way to Teesport , they claimed their eight-hour show of strength had been a success . |
| 11 | More distressingly , we discovered that the Aru islands and the Greater Bird of Paradise were no longer on their trading routes and that for the last twenty years they had been pursuing the shorter and more profitable triangular passage between Celebes , Java and Borneo . |
| 12 | They had been defending the building for 31 days and there was blood on the floor . |
| 13 | Almost as if they had been awaiting the signal of an extra moon , they now took their prancings into a more intense phase . |
| 14 | Mr Ben Ali had indicated some softening of his position towards the fundamentalists in an interview with visiting Arab journalists on Monday , saying that they had been offered the chance to open their own newspaper . |
| 15 | They were in a small audience chamber , and they had been excused the customary prostrations . |
| 16 | Students who are entitled to transitional relief will receive ⅕ of the relief they would have received if they had been paying the full community charge . |
| 17 | For nearly a generation they had been resisting the introduction of written inventories of peasant obligations , whose purpose was to prevent noblemen treating serfs in the arbitrary manner to which they were accustomed . |
| 18 | They had been challenging the sailing colliers for a number of years and the movement of coal was so important that the nautical press carried a daily feature and report on the coal trade . |
| 19 | At the last , Britain 's ambassador to Constantinople abandoned the encouragement he had been giving the Turks and advised them to go on negotiating , but by this time neither Britain nor France was in a position to withdraw the backing which they had been giving the sultan . |
| 20 | They had been told the main point — that Tildesley would make a profit for his ‘ warehousing ’ operation ( only fair , Le Roux claimed , since Tildesley took risks in buying the company , including the very real risk that Norton might never have raised the funds and he 'd stuck with FUS ) . |
| 21 | The military report claimed that when Georgian authorities protested to the Russian army headquarters in Gudauta , they had been told the attack had been to avenge shelling on Saturday of a Russian army unit . |
| 22 | The prehistoric trees looked as if they had been felled the day before , but they were as sterile as hot bricks from a kiln and probably one hundred and thirty million years old . |
| 23 | Blacks would have been better off now if , after being shipped to America in chains , they had been allowed the same freedom to prosper as willing immigrants were . |
| 24 | We 'd called at a house to install some concrete steps in the rear garden , and learnt that they had been burgled the previous night . |
| 25 | Amiss suspected they had been hammering the port harder than ever the previous night . |
| 26 | I actually said that there were relatively few anomalies and that if they had been addressed the tax would have found favour . |
| 27 | WGPT sales manager , announced at the conference that , as a result of co-operation between the two companies , they had been awarded the Shell Offshore Inc . |
| 28 | He returned late that afternoon , eager with the good news that they had been awarded the Rouen-Dieppe contract . |
| 29 | When the foundation removed twelve paintings on long-term loan to the museum , and sold the eight Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works at Christie 's , NY , in May 1989 , for $39.6 million ( including the 10% buyers ' premium ) , the museum sued for the money , claiming they had been promised the paintings . |