Example sentences of "what [be] to [be] the [adj] " in BNC.

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1 Strikes by Doherty ‘ s National Union of Operative Spinners , and in the coal fields , greatly alarmed Peel , at the Home Office ; and , in what were to be the dying days of the Tory administration , he looked unsuccessfully for a legal answer to what he called ‘ the constitution and acts of a confederacy calculated in its immediate effects to disturb the peace of the manufacturing districts , and capable , if allowed to gain strength and consistency , of being converted at once into an open resistance to the law . ’
2 Movies had always been made about the past , of course , if not so very frequently about that immediate past whose primary unit of measure is the decade rather than the century ; but it was probably Visconti 's The Damned in 1969 that inaugurated what were to be the definitive parameters of a new filmic style .
3 A few minutes before 5pm on Sunday , December 1st , all France it seemed was either holding its breath or , like team captain , Yannick Noah , was in prayer , as Forget , who had been well beaten in the opening rubber of the match by Andre Agassi , prepared to serve what was to be the final game of the 1991 competition .
4 By the early 1960s Leech was a major landowner in the area of what was to be the New Town .
5 The Leningrad historian , R.G. Skrynnikov , has suggested , though not without challenge , that it was in 1582 rather than 1581 , that the first foray or ‘ expedition ’ of cossack conquistadors under the leadership of ataman Yermak Timofeevich scored an unspectacular military victory over the tiny Tatar princedom of Sibir , then ruled by Khan Kuchum , thus laying the foundations for what was to be the irresistible Russian Drang nach Osten .
6 It was Alexander Herzen ( 1812–70 ) who , having emigrated to the West in 1847 , began to give currency to what was to be the dominant theme of the revolutionary wing of the intelligentsia for the next four decades .
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