Example sentences of "had [be] a [adj] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | The following morning , in her pigeonhole at the theatre , had been a sealed envelope . |
| 2 | Time was now important to him : it had been a lazy year and , as he had told Levy , there was still work for him to do . |
| 3 | There had been a similar car outside the school … |
| 4 | There had been a similar holder and brass chain in the parish room of his father 's Norfolk church but he could n't remember seeing one since . |
| 5 | A bomb exploded outside the house of Prime Minister Haidar Abu Bakr al-Attas in Sana'a on May 15 ; on the night of May 9-10 there had been a similar explosion outside the home of Salim Salih Mohammed , a member of Yemen 's provisional Presidential Council and of the Yemen Socialist Party leadership . |
| 6 | Mr Armstrong said there had been a similar incident last year when Mr Bowler had been stabbed but refused to make a statement to the police . |
| 7 | Why was there no comprehensive management plan , considering there had been a similar flood in 1990 ? |
| 8 | She had been a clerk-receptionist phone-answerer-teamaker and she had got the job through her uncle Bob who was as near to being a friend of Thomas Walby 's as it was possible to be . |
| 9 | It had been a narrow escape and I was impressed . |
| 10 | Thurmaston had been a typical Leicestershire village with all its farmhouses and cottages clustered together and surrounded by its huge open fields until the enclosure award of 1763 . |
| 11 | To make the most of beneficial planetary influences had been a principal object of Marsilio Ficino ( 1433–99 ) , one of the first scholars to give the practice of magic the semblance of respectability . |
| 12 | A selection of such writings appeared posthumously as Essays in Jewish History ( 1934 ) under the auspices of the Jewish Historical Society of England , of which he had been a principal founder . |
| 13 | Describing 1989 as ‘ a fantastic year for freedom ’ , Mrs Thatcher said 1979 had been a turning point in history and Conservatives were the pathfinders . |
| 14 | The long birdie putt Beck had earlier holed for an eagle three at the 13th had been a turning point , but for Norman , who does not normally play the week before the Masters , this must have also given him encouragement . |
| 15 | Whatever it was , she knew that the occasion had been a turning point in her feelings towards Liza . |
| 16 | Where he had been standing had been a turning point for cars once upon a time — when there were still cars in the world — but this had never been a place for modern things . |
| 17 | Her father had been a tight-lipped rather unloving man who had apparently taken little interest in Doreen . |
| 18 | Dr McIntyre 's examination had been a necessary , first , brief run-over , made without disturbing the body too much . |
| 19 | The role of symbol had been a necessary and successful one for de Gaulle up to this point , but it now became much more problematic . |
| 20 | Twenty years ago , it had been a cosy Victorian hostelry , seldom visited except by its regulars , with an open fire in winter and horse brasses polished to whiteness hung against the black beams . |
| 21 | It had been a simple matter after that to slip down to Mike Quinn , who was an acknowledged authority on all aspects of the disease by virtue of his ownership of one book , and borrow his Encyclopaedia of Human Ailments . |
| 22 | If Wordsworth had been a simple country boy , they could have patronized him ; the Johnsonian style of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads showed that he could write like the gentlemanly reviewers if he wanted to , and nothing is more infuriating than one of our own sort who ‘ lets the side down ’ . |
| 23 | oh I came , came to several conclusions , erm , one , one of the problems that the article faced me with , if it had been a simple outburst , if , if the , the Daily Telegraph had simply taken an advert out as opposed to maybe editorials then I may of had less a problem , because the problem with editorials is that they are believed , companies adverts are n't believed , well they 're partially believed , but an editorial carries a lot more weight and therefore when it 's written like that it tends to strike home much harder , therefore that , my immediate thoughts were that if were going to react , if we were going to find a way of cantering the problems we felt this had created , then we would not have to follow any normal course of action , we simply could n't put an advert out because nobody would have believed it , we would have to look at it a different way of actually cantering and that 's part of the reason for the time taking to think it through . |
| 24 | World War I had been a desperate see-saw battle up till its closing days . |
| 25 | By pre-arrangement the debate was limited to foreign and defence matters , which Mr Ford considered his strong suit because he had been a congressman and a vice-president while his opponent , Jimmy Carter , had been a mere governor of Georgia and a peanut farmer . |
| 26 | It had been a mere moment of whiteness seen out of the corner of her eye but it had not moved purposefully like a horse does with a rider . |
| 27 | Some expanding cities were the creations of the new era ; Yokohama had been a mere fishing village in 1853 , and Kobe , too , owed its expansion to foreign trade . |
| 28 | The pause , the question , had been a mere formality , the token request for permission men used to cover themselves against a variety of possible future accusations . |
| 29 | Whatever else he was , he was not in love with Janice — unless that moment in his office had been a mere innocent slip . |
| 30 | Between 1929 and the formation of the second National Government after the general election , the Liberal party had been a genuine participant in the political system and the other parties had to consider carefully what its reactions might be . |