Example sentences of "they had been [v-ing] [prep] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | 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 . |
| 2 | 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 . |
| 3 | The two teams arrived in the northern capital from Beijing where they had been competing in the Asian Games . |
| 4 | 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 . |
| 5 | All over Spain , rebel officers put into action the plan they had been elaborating since December of the previous year . |
| 6 | The American people told him at the polls what they had been screaming from the rooftops for two years . |
| 7 | When the greetings and exclamations were over , they told me that they had been staying on Mull for a few days , and had just arrived on Moila , and were putting up at the post office with Mrs McDougall . |
| 8 | They had been staying at a log cabin holiday home at Cropton , near Pickering , and yesterday , Ray Allanson , manager of the Forestry Commission 's Keldy Forest cabins , said : ‘ They left without any maps unaware of the dangers of walking in the forest at night . |
| 9 | They had been staying at a 16th century chateau near Compeigne . |
| 10 | With Dara once more clinging firmly and rather painfully to her arm she was walked back to the small , intimate table they had been sharing on the edge of the small dance-floor , but Ace was quickly on to his feet , side-stepping Dara 's attempt to greet him with a kiss . |
| 11 | Bernard and Laura escaped on to their sailing boat for much of the summer , a yacht they had been enjoying for some years now , and they pottered around Mykonos in Greece . |
| 12 | By the time Iran had attacked a Kuwaiti , a Saudi and then a Liberian tanker ( the last of these caught near the principal Saudi terminal at Ras Tanura ) , the GCC states had begun to recognize this sequence — as it was doubtless intended — as a signal to distance themselves from Iraq in the light of the support they had been providing for Baghdad . |
| 13 | They had been queueing since early morning in front of the larger shops and the department stores in Sauchiehall Street , Renfield Street and Argyle Street to buy blackout cloth . |
| 14 | To judge by the clutter of bottles , glasses , and over-filled ashtrays , and the brooding , weary faces , they had been debating for many hours . |
| 15 | The two drivers were later charged with dangerous driving , but it was widely suspected that they had been acting on orders . |
| 16 | Furthermore , a settlement arrangement was made whereby the creditor countries could exchange on a monthly basis their accumulations of the weaker currencies ( which they had been buying in the EC exchange markets ) for some other form of reserve asset . |
| 17 | Fifty miles south-west of the railway line bomb , 13 Platoon of 6 UDR reported in for duty at 0600 ; they had been hoping for a quiet day , in order to catch up on some training . |
| 18 | Culdub Oakapple opened his mouth to say that acclaim was all very well in its way , but they had been hoping for something a bit more financial than that , but the two Gnomes on each side of him trod on his foot to stop him , because you could not always trust the Oakapple to be tactful . |
| 19 | Tom 's quick testing of her tendon reflexes revealed their characteristic briskness , and both the medical professionals realised that the condition was progressing , when they had been hoping against all the evidence that it would not . |
| 20 | They had been drinking for the best part of an hour but none were drunk . |
| 21 | They had been drinking in the local dockyard club in the company of Maddison and his fiancee , Deborah Scott , 29 , and all four had left together . |
| 22 | Like the GenSyn apes they had been experimenting upon . |
| 23 | They had been flying for 16 hours 12 minutes , had survived two bad storms and had flown over 1,800 miles of ocean . |
| 24 | They may not have found quite the soulmate in each other that they had been looking for , but their relationship has made up for it in other ways . |
| 25 | By searching for flashes repeating at exactly the same rate as the radio pulses , they were able to investigate much fainter pulsations than if they had been looking for pulses occurring at an unknown rate . |
| 26 | You may lose some credibility with the clientele if you demolish him or her with a blitzkrieg attack only to find later that they had been looking for the nearest toilet ! |
| 27 | All three were still dressed in what they had been wearing in the camp : corduroy trousers , khaki shirts and pullovers and big nailed boots . |
| 28 | By the end of 1941 it looked as though the Communists and their supporters had established the monopoly over the Left for which they had been striving since their foundation . |
| 29 | They had been moving in a group , or trying to : actually , they had straggled widely at times . |
| 30 | He realised they had been watching for some minutes before he noticed them . |