Example sentences of "[noun sg] had [adv] be [adv] [adj] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | No lovemaking had ever been as erotic or as liberating as their half-illicit couplings on unyielding sand within yards of the crashing tide . |
| 2 | Maybe the listening had always been more important than the absolution . |
| 3 | Although Burn had never been very active in the affairs of the Institute , his career had long been the subject of interest and indeed curiosity . |
| 4 | During the campaign period the DPP had purposely been less strident in its controversial advocacy of Taiwanese independence . |
| 5 | The ones appointed to do the job had never been very good at it , but he had heard a rumour that Horemheb was training a secret corps of police , answering to him alone but set up in the pharaoh 's name and in the interests of national security . |
| 6 | He thought the transition period had always been too long , because authority deserts a dying king , and neither China nor the Hong Kong people were going to take much notice of us by the time it got to the Nineties . |
| 7 | If that was the case , incest had never been more fun . |
| 8 | You might at best have noted that the puppy had before been slightly lame . |
| 9 | No architect before him had thought so profoundly about how buildings should function and no other had ever been so nimble in adapting to changes of fashion without loss of integrity . |
| 10 | After Edward Adeane 's departure , David Roycroft , who was a career diplomat from the Foreign Office , had held the fort until a successor could be found , but the whole set-up had always been curiously amateurish . |
| 11 | Karelius said , ‘ The good news had better be damned good . ’ |
| 12 | Though the palazzo is our family home , my father had never been very happy there . |
| 13 | He could not remember if his father had always been so wary , but he thought not . |
| 14 | The living-room had once been almost elegant : high , with a deep frieze , plaster cornice , and an elaborate ceiling rose , reminders of a time when even prosperous merchants lived over their shops . |
| 15 | Among the ‘ lower caste ’ people , the woman 's role had always been rather different from her role in the farming castes ; now ‘ lower caste ’ women worked increasingly in the fields alongside the men and this led , according to Mamdani , to ‘ a radical change … in the attitude towards girl children … low caste families do not look upon the birth of a girl with the disfavour they used to ’ — though ‘ to a certain extent the disfavour persists because the girl will marry and emigrate precisely when she has reached the age of greatest productivity ’ . |
| 16 | For a gentleman , a tailor 's bill had always been very low in his priorities for settlement . |
| 17 | Whereas country life had before been relatively quiescent , it now became unsettled and the foci of dissatisfaction altered ; protests against taxes were regularly staged from about 1540 , and after 1550 gave way to larger-scale insurrections such as those at Romans in 1580 , in the south west during the 1590s , and , much later , the Camisard rebellion in the Cévennes which began in 1688 . |
| 18 | Perhaps if your uncle had only been home more often … ’ |
| 19 | The operation had apparently been quite straightforward ; Kirsty was home in under a week and back at work after a month , with no obvious after-effects . |
| 20 | This bespectacled bear of a man had been born and lived here all his life , and was now Makassar 's sole expert and international exporter of the rare shells and orchids for which the archipelago had once been so famous . |
| 21 | And the tone of the letter had definitely been very frightening . |
| 22 | I have no idea how I was , although Jack and my relieved director assured me that the audience had just been coolly first-nightish and we , the cast , had stayed calm and thawed them into real pleasure and ultimate Rejoycing . |
| 23 | My mum had always been very open , but I had problems talking to her simply because she was my mum . |
| 24 | William 's mum had never been too bothered about the Church ; she had other gods to propitiate . |
| 25 | Golf Illustrated 's lengthy accounts states ‘ difficulty after difficulty had to be surmounted , not with ease ’ and tells us the course had previously been partly arable , partly waste and that one professional condemned the prospects of the course unless £10,000 were spent on it . ’ |
| 26 | At the beginning of the century , chemistry and physics had still been fairly cheap : the expensive sciences were astronomy and exploration with its associated natural history , the Humboldtian programme ; but by the latter half of the century physics and chemistry , though still to our eyes heavily dependent on sealing wax and string , were becoming the big science of the day . |
| 27 | Isabel Lavender had always been less good than most people at losing face , since she had never learned how to compensate for it , she had never learned to wallow , to conceal partial humiliation in an expression of total defeat . |
| 28 | The warning her anxious mother had impressed on her as they 'd waited for Folly 's plane at Athens airport had obviously been quite correct . |
| 29 | In all the paintings the deviations from traditional perspective , which in landscape painting had hitherto been only slight , are carried to new lengths . |
| 30 | English gold had always been readily available for information of a political nature . |