Example sentences of "they had [been] [verb] [prep] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | Over dinner he gave an enthralling account of the entire mission , their excitement at penetrating the Flow undetected , matched only by their relief at finding the way out , and of how on reaching home waters they had been cheered into Wilhelmshaven by the rest of the German fleet and flown to Berlin for a celebratory banquet with Hitler . |
| 2 | They had never been observant Jews ; they had been steeped in German , not Jewish , culture and identified with it . |
| 3 | Whilst this is a fast and relatively painless process , the files will require handling in exactly the same way as if they had been transferred across a simple serial link . |
| 4 | They had been observed by the disciples and passed on by word of mouth . |
| 5 | They had been joined on the site by the police marksmen . |
| 6 | Among Sikhs , for example , many of the first male immigrants arrived in the 1950s , by the 60s they had been joined by their wives and children and by the 70s many of them had brought their elderly parents . |
| 7 | They had been joined by Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander Andrew Grierson . |
| 8 | Furthermore they had been joined by universities in commercial and industrial cities , beginning with London , and including Manchester , Birmingham , Leeds , Liverpool , Newcastle and Bristol . |
| 9 | They felt that through joining the movement they had been liberated from the ills of modern society and that they were at last free to make the world a better place and themselves better people . |
| 10 | They had been thinking of a job in Parma to which I would commute daily ; but this one sounded very interesting , something after my own heart . |
| 11 | The former concept had a crucial historical advantage at the birth of mechanics ; Western thinkers approaching things as materials which stay put until the craftsman or builder reaches for them , would not have started trying to measure how the inert is moved by external forces if they had been thinking in terms of inherently active ch'i . |
| 12 | The passengers had n't over-enjoyed their sojourn in the station , it appeared , as they had been fallen upon by the flock of pressmen who had taken Xanthe back again to the brink of hysteria , and had asked Mercer whether it was n't unwise to flaunt the privilege of wealth in his private car , and had n't he invited trouble by adding it to the train ? |
| 13 | They swirled together as though they had been stirred with a spoon . |
| 14 | While they had been delayed by Duvall 's attack on Devlin , the thing had withdrawn from the basement window and lurched through the storm to the front of the building . |
| 15 | The two teams arrived in the northern capital from Beijing where they had been competing in the Asian Games . |
| 16 | He hat eventually decided to ask Security 's registry and its computers for a trace muddling the trail by getting a colleague to send the request for him and burying it in a list of acronyms as if they had been collected over a period of time . |
| 17 | They had been noticed by Jessica at half past ten that morning , searing the peaceful waters of Lough Swilly with a little sporty powerboat , bright red and snarling . |
| 18 | There they lived their lives , and prospered for a while ; but there was a disquiet amongst them , for it was said that they had been created with a purpose in this life , and that the purpose had something to do with the manner of their creation . |
| 19 | The Bishop of Ely claimed Benwick as part of his chase : they had been met by the bishop 's bailiff , leading three priests in full vestments , with Bible , cross and candle , ‘ so that they could make no inquest there that day ’ . |
| 20 | Neither the crew of this vessel nor its captain , a certain Captain Robert Anderson who , I believe , is still at large , knew that they had been monitored from the moment they had left port by an American spy-in-the sky satellite . |
| 21 | Erm and so therefore er they , they knew tools that they had been using since the period of the war , erm were gradually being overtaken by the new types of ceramic tools . |
| 22 | Many of them by now had been in Malta for several months … and ever since Italy had entered into the war , these boys , often in obsolete aircraft , had carried out bravely and unquestioning , any task that they had been called upon to perform . |
| 23 | Courts , if they had been called upon to investigate people 's employment protection rights , might well have deemed some of them to have had one continuous employment relationship broken only by shortages of work rather than a series of different relationships . |
| 24 | Early last year the Ministry of Defence announced new measures to discourage bullying after young recruits revealed that they had been pushed into rivers , pelted with stones , and gassed with CS gas . |
| 25 | Well , they were expensive if you had to buy them but they had been given to me , along with a pair of golf shoes , by the Italian company which supplied Jack . |
| 26 | " It 's just a trick , really , it 's easy , " said Clara , and she took back the egg , and found that she could not put it together again either , so they decided to abandon it , and left it in little pieces in a glass dish on the mantelpiece with some dry and coloured gourds , and then they went downstairs and out into the park , and walked towards the bus stop , and Clara explained , lest the gourds and the egg should be thought to reflect in any way on herself , that they had been given to her by a friend the week before , to celebrate her twenty-second birthday . |
| 27 | The crew had one last night with their families , and the opportunity to share with them some of the advance they had been given by Yong . |
| 28 | I still number some of them as personal friends all these years later , but at the time what struck me was their unbelievable competence and sheer quality compared with the wretchedly small scope they had been given in prewar Britain . |
| 29 | One has seen people from the shop floor sent to help start up plants overseas , and seen them rapidly take responsibilities far beyond those which they had been given in their home organization . |
| 30 | He hated untidiness and waste ; he thought that babies who threw things from their cradles should be punished , and children who would n't eat their food should be starved until they ate what they had been given in the first place . ’ |