Example sentences of "had be [to-vb] a " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | Her earlier fears had faded and she thought how foolish she had been to let a ridiculous fancy disturb her happiness . |
| 2 | Some believed indeed that the original intention of Soviet Mediterranean deployments had been to induce a negotiated withdrawal of the United States ' Sixth Fleet . |
| 3 | As Bishop Brinton said , it had been to restore a rightful heir to his kingdom and to defeat tyranny that the campaign in northern Spain had been fought in 1367 . |
| 4 | I suppose I had been given a sense of the evil of cinema by my strict Methodist grandparents , who were visibly shocked when once I confessed that I had been to see a film on Sunday . |
| 5 | He had been to see a palmist and shown him her photo . |
| 6 | Principally the visit had been to see a senior boy with lifelong problems who had suddenly become unmanageable and would have to be admitted to an asylum , but while there he had been asked to assess Anna Beckett , a child who had moved him strangely . |
| 7 | One of his ideas had been to take a small naval party with him who would attempt to scuttle a ship in the harbour mouth . |
| 8 | The initial aim in forming the DUP had been to create a united unionist party which would be as orthodox in its constitutional position as the Unionist Party of Craig and Brookeborough . |
| 9 | Why they were as they were , and what kind of man her great-great-great-grandfather had been to create a place like this . |
| 10 | In establishing a Peace Council the aim had been to create a body composed of representatives of associations , political parties , the private sector and the government to design a new peace strategy . |
| 11 | The mission had been to penetrate a terrorist base in Libya and eliminate all personnel , which included Salim Al-Makesh , an advisor to the Black June , a movement founded by Abu Nidal in I976 in protest at the involvement of Syria in the Lebanese civil war , and Jean-Jacques Bernard , a senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine . |
| 12 | All that scuffling had been to move an armchair round to the front of the desk . |
| 13 | His first experience in magic had been to give a show at the Miners Welfare hall at the age of 11 . |
| 14 | The king 's original intention , goaded by the Pope 's refusal to grant him a divorce , had been to effect a greater lay control of an uncertain church . |
| 15 | Mr Bradford , who lived with his four brothers in Western Road , Brentwood , had been to visit a girlfriend the previous evening . |
| 16 | Her brief had been to visit a number of Northern provincial collections and select works that would fit neatly within her chosen theme . |
| 17 | The Teutonic Knights had indeed penetrated eastwards , but their influence , when it was not military , had been to spread a lifestyle and set of material , cultural and linguistic bearings rather than set in motion the bodily removal and resettlement of vast numbers of Germans . |
| 18 | Arguments of this sort which confused the " lower sorts of men " with the " higher sorts of ape " were not simply exercises in increasingly refined scientific discrimination ; they were closely meshed in with an ongoing dialectical debate , the original purpose of which had been to establish a synthesis between the theological doctrine of the Fall and the newly discovered facts of human geography . |
| 19 | He thought of his dam that had been to make a lake . |
| 20 | There was , however , this to be said : there had been political involvement under Miall in the 1840s but this had been to achieve a narrow , sectarian goal — disestablishment . |
| 21 | And Jonathan would never have recognised her as the girl to whom he had become engaged , the easygoing girl whose only concern had been to have a good time , however much money it took . |
| 22 | His aspiration then had been to inject a " Schopenhauerian seriousness " into his subject , and the ideal had never been abandoned . |
| 23 | In an end-of-year assessment at Westminster , Mr Ashdown admitted that when he became leader , his job had been to stabilise a party ‘ in a fast downward spiral of disintegration ’ . |
| 24 | If the objective of his policy had been to maintain a balance of power by opposing the strongest nation in Europe , he was no doubt picking the wrong enemy ; France was the rising power , and later in the century English policy was devoted to holding her in check . |
| 25 | The initial objective of the ITE initiative had been to encourage a reorientation of the work supported by ITAB into avenues of relevance to the engineering community , using the existing committee structure as far as possible . |
| 26 | She walked on , wondering whose decision it had been to buy a retirement home in such an isolated spot . |
| 27 | I recall that two years ago at the NFT he announced that his great ambition as a young man had been to become a movie director : now ( aided by director of photography William Lubtchansky and production designer Chloe Obolensky ) he has made a landmark television film . |
| 28 | Their task had been to raid an enemy landing strip at Marble Arch , the British nickname for a vast triumphal arch erected by Mussolini in the middle of the desert to mark the border of Tripolitania . |