Example sentences of "could not [vb infin] a " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | Rubberneck knew them all , pious lives ; he had been lectured them a hundred times , even if he still could not fix a face to a saint , or only ( he felt an affinity ) St Francis . |
| 2 | Illusion could not fix a position from a sextant reading , nor fight two hundred square feet of heavy flogging wet canvas in a tumbling sea and a rough wind . |
| 3 | A southern Italian , he had taught up until now in a village near Naples and could not speak a word either of Slovene or of Triestino . |
| 4 | Held , allowing the appeal , that once an order was made under section 31 of the Children Act 1989 placing a child in the care of a local authority , responsibility for the care of the child was firmly with the local authority and the family proceedings court could not retain a power of review over the care order by including directions ; and that , accordingly , the direction relating to the continued involvement of the guardian ad litem would be deleted ( post , p. 812B , G ) . |
| 5 | But on March 20th , a week before the hearing was due , he withdrew his request , saying that he could not expect a fair hearing from the governor and had no wish to take part in an ‘ empty game ’ . |
| 6 | Kirov could not repress a slightly bitter , ironic smile as he thought about it . |
| 7 | Now in terms of whether it should be five thousand plus , that of course is a matter of whether there is demand , now my my conclusion , from my fairly extensive knowledge of Greater York , is that you just could not fit a new settlement that size satisfactorily into the settlement and landscape pattern of Greater York , or its immediate surrounds , I just can not identify a location where that could be where where the roads , the public transport , the landscape , or indeed the agricultural land quality , from now onto five an area , suitably large for that type of what would be a a new town . |
| 8 | She could not move a step . |
| 9 | A virtual mummy , a living corpse that could not twitch a fingertip — though did any fingers or even fingerbones remain within that mass of medical machinery ? |
| 10 | One consequence was that Pitt had to float special government loans at high discounts , because he could not secure a sufficient sum from the " market " . |
| 11 | And it all began in 1890 when a successful businessman , who could not dance a step , presented four ordinary little girls from Manchester in a pantomime at the Prince of Wales Theatre , Liverpool . |
| 12 | Grim as events might seem , Britain could not contemplate a ‘ massive new immigration commitment ’ which could ‘ more than double the ethnic minority population of the United Kingdom ’ . |
| 13 | They are the reason I could not contemplate a life lacking a daily sight of hills . |
| 14 | At times like that I could not care a toss for JTR and wondered why the hell I was in such a situation . |
| 15 | Geoffrey Chaucer could not hold a conversation with a modern Englishman , even though they are linked to each other by an unbroken chain of some twenty generations of Englishmen , each of whom could speak to his immediate neighbours in the chain as a son speaks to his father . |
| 16 | Unfortunately he could not offer a time for his visit . |
| 17 | Britten and William Plomer , his librettist , must have known instinctively that an opera celebrating the most masterful sovereign in English history nevertheless could not offer a modern ( even a Coronation ) audience Good Queen Bess or Schiller 's avenging spitfire . |
| 18 | ( And yet I remember one morning — when confronted by a preliminary plate of very sour , very cold slices of orange I could not stop a few tears trickling miserably down my cheeks — a gruff voice coming from the other end of the table . |
| 19 | Robert Sherwood ‘ could not detect a single flaw — not one error of taste or of authenticity ’ and he particularly appreciated the absence of ‘ scenes wherein the doughboys dash over the top carrying the American flag ’ . |
| 20 | We could not detect a significant immunological difference between drug users who seroconverted with bacterial pneumonia and those without , but owing to the long sampling interval the lowest CD4 counts were not necessarily measured . |
| 21 | In the present study , we could not detect a significant difference in orocaecal transit time between patients with and patients without cardiovascular autonomic neuropathy . |
| 22 | Mr Emig said there were gaps in the evidence and that , in the commission 's view , the South African track and field federation could not conduct a doping control as their membership of the International Amateur Athletic Federation was still under suspension . |
| 23 | I could not bear a dull father-in-law . |
| 24 | That , and the discovery that she could not bear a man near her in the early days after the rape ; so she had feigned an illness , explained as the consequence of her breaking her engagement with Havvie , which , of course , had caused an immense furore inside and outside of society , and Mama and Papa had put off their visit to England , and sent her loving letters , for she had written that she had discovered that she did not really love Havvie at all , had merely been beglamoured by his appearance , name and title . |
| 25 | Moreover , there is no reason to believe that , with improvements , particularly in relation to housing , labour mobility programmes could not affect a larger number of workers . |
| 26 | They covered their complacent idleness and ignorance with theological catchphrases which could not excuse a lack of grasp . |
| 27 | The Financial Advisers ( now Charles Luker with John Chalcraft ) , juggled to keep things afloat but could not prevent a small deficit in 1943 . |
| 28 | In doing so it probably aroused some sympathy among the Party membership , though it could not prevent a movement which was receiving support from national figures . |
| 29 | During the first days of that Holy Week Mrs Abigail continued to believe that she could not endure a marriage that was a travesty , and that she could no longer endure life in Dynmouth . |
| 30 | If BR could not make a case for seven trains for one of its most profitable routes , it was clear that plans for a second tranche of HSTs for the Cross Country group of services would not satisfy the new criteria . |