Example sentences of "he had once [verb] " in BNC.
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| 1 | He delighted his acolytes with tales about his time in the Army and how he had once lost an entire platoon . |
| 2 | He had once seen a naturalist on the television who seemed to him to be an analogue of himself . |
| 3 | His face was so dark and wizened that he reminded Corbett of a monkey he had once seen in the royal menagerie in the Tower of London . |
| 4 | There had even been times when he 'd found himself imagining her with no clothes on at all — the way he had once seen Peggy Podmore — and felt the same keen desire well up in him . |
| 5 | He realized with a shock that they reminded him of steers he had once seen in a railroad siding back home in Richmond , Virginia , crowded uncomprehendingly in trucks bound for the slaughterhouse . |
| 6 | Edward stood still ; he had once seen a whole flock of long-tailed tits here , swinging like pink jewels among the flickering leaves of a silver birch . |
| 7 | He was drawn to the traditions of Sephardism , he had once explained ; that rigorous and secluded tradition appealed to his own sensibility , in the same way that " free-thinking " Jews seemed to him to come too close to the rational Unitarianism which he despised . |
| 8 | There are other images , too : he mentions the " ailanthus " , one of which stood in the yard of the Mary Institute where he had once played , and the " briar rose " by his father 's house in Gloucester ; in addition , he employs words like " rote " or " groaner " which he had heard as a child in New England . |
| 9 | He drew open the neck of the leather bag that lay beside him , and reached inside to withdraw with loving care that same psaltery he had once played in Donata 's bedchamber , polished sounding-board and stretched strings shining like new . |
| 10 | The proud possessor of a fragment of the Infant Jesus 's vest , a toy he had once played with ( Benjamin would have been proud of that ) , and a hair from St Peter 's beard which could cure the ague or a sore throat . |
| 11 | sense of a cultural order which he had once sought and which , by the strange alchemy of his career , he now embodied . |
| 12 | He was talking about his childhood in Wales and how he had once wanted to be a detective . |
| 13 | Nevertheless , two hundred years after Charles 's death , the inhabitants of the lands he had once ruled were identified as Kerlinger , Carlenses : " Charles 's men " ; and in the thirteenth century , when King Louis IX arranged at St-Denis the tombs of the kings who had preceded him , he left two in positions of special honour , the Merovingian Dagobert , greatest of the First Frankish dynasty , and Charles the Bald . |
| 14 | He had once believed in the perfect system . |
| 15 | The driver objected on the ground that he was averse to needles and that he had once fainted when giving a sample of blood . |
| 16 | With one of those insights which showed a mind much subtler than that of many of his contemporaries , he had drawn an analogy between logical positivism and surrealism ; but he told me on this occasion that he had once asked A.J. Ayer , as he then was , what political beliefs were compatible with logical positivism : to which the reply had been , not altogether to his surprise , that they would be decidedly left-wing . |
| 17 | John could easily believe it ; be remembered how , when he was walking the route of that particular line , he had once asked for a glass of water at a cottage and been charged eightpence for it . |
| 18 | Richard , back from work after a tiresome day , stopped on the Embankment to look , and remembered that he had once gone on board the Waalhaven for a drink when she put in at Orfordness . |
| 19 | He almost told her that he had once lived a year with a girl he had married navvy-style , over the anvil , and had got her with child before she ran away from him . |
| 20 | I went back to the Maggot 's foul house , where he kept his killer dog and astonishing collection of guns , and we sat on his makeshift verandah that overlooked a noxious and polluted creek and shared a few whiskies as he told me an incredibly tedious tale of how he had once sacked the quarterback of the San Francisco Sugar Plums . |
| 21 | Turning to face her , he was visited suddenly , not by desire , but by a memory , inconveniently intense , of the desire he had once felt for her . |
| 22 | He was not clear about it , had no notion of his objective or destination ; he knew only that he had once felt filled with high sense of purpose , that aimlessness had not then been his condition , but a starry conviction . |
| 23 | And he wrote a sonnet about a plate of ham and a mug of beer he had once tasted , after walking for miles and miles . |
| 24 | For instance , Piers 's unforthcoming remark about avoiding love because he had once tasted it and it had left a bitter after-effect . |
| 25 | Reason said he could n't possibly have any recollection of a nineteen-year-old nobody he had once caused to be dismissed from her first job , but the knowledge of her bones was stronger . |
| 26 | Tolkien 's epic is more like a romantic reflection of pre-1914 British life and of those models of manly virtue he had once witnessed and cherished , it seems likely , in the grim camaraderie of the trenches in the First World War . |
| 27 | He had virtually no bite , as he had once overheard Adam say to Bridget , and heard it with helpless chagrin . |
| 28 | According to local rumour , he had once threatened Chris Blackwell with a machete . |
| 29 | Shakily Fernando eased away from her and in that terrible second she hesitated , fearing the rejection he had once threatened her with . |
| 30 | A narrow plot of mean suburban proportions compared to the place he had once possessed . |