Example sentences of "[prep] what [vb past] [adv] be " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | Our chances of ending the war quickly would certainly be greatly increased if the battle were won ; but if we failed to win it , even after what had already been achieved , our victory would merely be postponed and not rendered impossible , especially if we resolved in good time not to persist with our useless efforts at Verdun , but to take the initiative of attack elsewhere . |
| 2 | Contemporaries remember him coming scowling to school after what had clearly been rows with his patron . |
| 3 | Perhaps the best known version is Shakespeare 's seven ages of man which is a poetic statement of what had already been received wisdom for centuries and was to remain so for centuries to come . |
| 4 | Now that he was clear of the hawthorn scent of the hedge and the reek of cattle dung , he became fully aware of what had already been drifting into his nostrils while he was lying among the thorn . |
| 5 | He was philosophical , not to say laid back about the inconvenience of being called out unnecessarily at the end of what had already been a long day . |
| 6 | I finally turned to Kent , not because of what had already been discovered there but because it was on my doorstep and a lot more accessible than either France or Wiltshire . |
| 7 | The limits of what had formerly been considered the proper role of the state had changed . |
| 8 | Nobody was yet greatly concerned about the poverty of what had just been called the Third World . |
| 9 | Sharing the problem at once halves it , reduces the feeling of victimisation , and helps to establish the larger dimensions of what had previously been regarded as a local problem . |
| 10 | Certainly they conceded that these activities were popular in the sense that millions of people availed themselves of them but their argument had been that only in a very limited way can we talk of these activities as belonging to the masses : rather they represented the expropriation and packaging of what had previously been popular forms by middle-class organizations and in most cases by businessmen and entrepreneurs . |
| 11 | In retrospect , what Essays in Criticism seems to have represented was the institutional absorption after the War of the so-called " critical revolution " of the interwar period , and the professionalisation of what had previously been a more or less oppositional movement within the academy . |
| 12 | Last year a cache of Second World War shells were unearthed on the site of what had previously been a scrap yard . |
| 13 | This was reflected in a loosening of what had traditionally been a strong correlation between landownership and civil and military office , especially at the highest level . |
| 14 | ‘ It was all thanks to a woman at the meeting today that I had my first inkling of what had really been going on . ’ |
| 15 | Rather there had been a subtle unravelling of what had once been a more integrated pattern of recreation . |
| 16 | The only other customers in the ‘ Ravel ’ that afternoon were a musician with a small Irish fiddle and his companion , a tall skeletal man with the remains of what had once been an extremely fine hat , crammed down over his greasy locks . |
| 17 | Then , sighing , Charles opened the car door and stepped into the desolation of what had once been Thrush Green rectory . |
| 18 | The cliffs which had proved so difficult bordered a valley a mile or more across , the bed of what had once been a great , meandering river . |
| 19 | We had a collection of cars , mostly rather old , but here was an example of what had once been a great cultural status symbol . |
| 20 | They were no longer men , just the vestigial remains of what had once been human beings . |
| 21 | A little later from his bedroom , where he had retired for a rest , he watched through his daughters ' brass telescope as the grey shadow of what had once been the sleek and lively Hari moved slowly over to the sepoy lines with , as usual , the Prime Minister dodging along behind am . |
| 22 | Just before dawn the sound of a voice singing came over the darkened expanse of what had once been the Residency compound from the direction of what had once been the Cutcherry . |
| 23 | Just before dawn the sound of a voice singing came over the darkened expanse of what had once been the Residency compound from the direction of what had once been the Cutcherry . |
| 24 | In the harbour lay enormous foreign freighters for carrying the timber away , exuding oil over the graves of what had once been the most famous coral gardens in the Far East . |
| 25 | In 1893 the eminent physiologist J. S. Burdon-Sanderson ( 1828–1905 ) told the British Association for the Advancement of Science that ‘ oecology ’ was one of the three great divisions of biology , along with physiology and morphology , and was in some ways the most attractive of the three because it came closest to the spirit of what had once been called the ‘ philosophy of living nature ’ . |
| 26 | It was on the first floor of what had once been a small eighteenth-century town-house . |
| 27 | The time difference between London and Mexico City is six hours , and because we had been travelling with the sun , it was still quite high in the sky as we descended into the sepia haze that hung over the whole flat expanse of what had once been a great lake . |
| 28 | The glade where the ghost orchids grew amid the crumbling remains of what had once been a Roman villa was as cool as the church , and an unmistakable smell of summer blossoms mingled with the lush green growth of the wood . |
| 29 | The whole area was no more than ten or fifteen years old , straggling along either side of what had once been a country road and ending messily with the shell of an unfinished building of some indeterminate nature . |
| 30 | He told himself that the office would have been an addition , built onto the end of what had before been an exterior wall of brick and therefore powerful enough to hold back the spread of the flames . |