Example sentences of "[pron] had [been] [verb] [prep] [adj] " in BNC.
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| 1 | One second I had been speeding at fifty miles an hour along a ribbon of uninterrupted concrete ; the next , to the wide-eyed amusement of a group of policemen standing beside a checkpoint , there was a loud crunch , every shock absorber on the Nissan thudded home to its end-stops and I found myself dead in the water by a pothole large enough to accommodate half Balboa 's army . |
| 2 | I decided to go back to the village , to thank him for all his help , and to carry out a plan I had been considering for some time . |
| 3 | I had been invited to 10 Downing Street for dinner a number of times and on one of those occasions Harold Wilson asked me if I could suggest someone who would go to Salisbury and meet Ian Smith in order to find out whether there was any basis for renewing negotiations . |
| 4 | I had been warned of this , and was therefore able to take the extra engagements in my stride , and to enjoy the opportunity to visit varying institutions and talk to people of all positions on the academic scene . |
| 5 | I would have to go to my constituency and say that I had been outbid by Tory Ministers , and that after complaining for all these years about their accruing power to themselves I had found that I had been wrong all the time . |
| 6 | It dealt with something about which I had been writing to Social Security Ministers for about six months — abuse of the benefit-in-kind regulations , whereby highly paid people were paying themselves in gilt unit trusts . |
| 7 | Intending to be a priest of the Church of England , I lost my faith , slowly but painfully , and at the end of the summer left Oxford and the house in Norham Gardens in which I had been living for two years and in which , by a curious turn of fortune , my office now is . |
| 8 | I took a drink from one of the twenty-four plastic gallon containers which I had been collecting for two years . |
| 9 | By the time I was twelve years old I had been thinking for some time about getting a bird of my own . |
| 10 | I experienced a moment of complete terror in which my mind raced — I had been discovered after all ; it was obvious that I had a limp ; everyone could see it ; they 'd seen it all along and had chosen this moment to hit me with it , my weakest moment … |
| 11 | When I was in Rapeman , I ca n't say it really surprised me because I had been exposed to English people before , but I did n't think that people were being serious initially . |
| 12 | First of all I had been subjected to two substantial costs consequent upon some unexplained administrative delay . |
| 13 | My flight path ended on a small ledge , my hands still grasping Olympus camera which I had been cradling for all my worth , regardless of the blows striking my body from every angle . |
| 14 | It was a cold day and I had been standing in that particular spot for half an hour , so I was glad to get into the car , which was driven by a smart-looking man in a tweed cap . |
| 15 | Whoever expected the little grey devils I had been assaulting with white arrows and rolling with white healing balls to reappear in my lung ? |
| 16 | Fifteen years were to pass before I had a book published by Faber 's , but by then I had been launched by other publishing houses . |
| 17 | I had been enthralled by true stories of savage tribes , frontier raids and lion hunts . |
| 18 | It was not however , until I arrived in the country , and found myself surrounded by objects as strange as if I had been transported to another planet , that I conceived the idea of devoting a portion of my attention to the mammalian class of its extraordinary fauna . ’ |
| 19 | In late August I was finishing my day at the heart clinic , where I had been working for several months , when I decided that it was time to go . |
| 20 | I had been working for more than an hour and my wrists ached from the continuous chopping , but I was filled with an immense exhilaration . |
| 21 | I think what was different in my approach , and it partly goes back to my background , is that firstly I had been working on educational planning , and that secondly I come from a background of market research . |
| 22 | ‘ I thought I had been booked in one of the earlier matches at Windsor Park but I was n't certain , ’ said the Queen 's Park Rangers centre back . |
| 23 | The wood at the back of the painting was deeply scored with a dagger as if someone had been searching for some secret crevice or compartment . |
| 24 | He said he lost them about a week ago and heard today that a set which might have been his had been used by that psychic woman . |
| 25 | The apartment 's previous owners had hired an expensive interior designer from New York and ordered her to trick out the rooms in a horse-country olde-English Spy-Cartoons look , which had been done to extravagant perfection , but McIllvanney was none of those things . |
| 26 | Angry though the prince was about this , he was still trying to repair the damage which had been done to Russo-Bulgarian relations when Roumelian irredentists took the game out of his hands . |
| 27 | Those authorities show that , in approaching the language of the Act of 1986 , one must pay particular attention to the purposes and policies of its own provisions and be wary of simply carrying over uncritically meanings which had been given to similar words in the earlier Act . |
| 28 | In the drama departments there was a general welcome for the move away from written papers , which had been seen by many drama specialists as a cause of confusion between drama and English literature , with students often finding it difficult to respond to the change in emphasis towards a set text that this involved . |
| 29 | Ancient customs such as ‘ bundling ’ , intimate but fully clothed and ritualistic forms of petting , cuddling and courtship in bed , which had been policed by local traditions in rural society , continued into industrial society . |
| 30 | This term was reserved for the rural dialects , which had been legitimized by nineteenth-century investigations , and which were believed to be ‘ genuine ’ in a way that urban dialects are not . |