Example sentences of "he [vb past] never been [adj] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | ‘ Of diphtheria , but he 'd never been strong . |
| 2 | Yeah er attractive , anyway what was I saying , I was talking to her and she said that she 'd had a talk with Foxy and Foxy had said excuse me , and I just felt I just felt so paranoid because she was saying , talking about all the , how he 'd never been faithful to anyone and how , and I really did feel , would n't you feel awful if everyone was saying oh Sal , yeah , Sal , Sal 's making a real effort but but no she said |
| 3 | Damn it , he had n't meant to betray that he 'd never been able to forget that afternoon , and the sweet innocence that had touched something very deep within him . |
| 4 | He had never been close to his son , Mark 's father , but had doted on his grandson and had often talked to him of the old Russia . |
| 5 | Maybe he had never been innocent . |
| 6 | Nastily , she said , and he had never been that before . |
| 7 | He had never been much of a fellow for breasts . |
| 8 | Thrush Green was sorry to hear that he had never been married , had been married unhappily and was now separated from his wife , had been happily married and lost his wife in childbirth , and ( disastrously ) still married , with a wife who would be coming to live with him at the corner house within a few days . |
| 9 | Now , as the son came to see the marble bust for the last time , court photographers crowded around to capture the poignancy of the son saying goodbye , presumably with a sense of terrible failure , to the father for whom he had never been good enough . |
| 10 | But he had never been closer to it than the road and now , driving up to it , it struck him again that the description ‘ cottage ’ was hardly appropriate . |
| 11 | He was a family man and , despite being a native New Yorker , he had never been closer to real violence in his whole life than on the TV. screen of his comfortable suburban house in Richmond . |
| 12 | Craig was suddenly in the room , moving towards her , holding out his arms to her as though he had never been absent . |
| 13 | He had never been afraid or apprehensive before , but now he realised that something was amiss . |
| 14 | He had never been this way before . |
| 15 | Yet he had never been further from his native village than the horse and carriage festival forty miles away , where he competed every year . |
| 16 | He had never been able to deal with the outside . |
| 17 | All his dealings had been with himself and that larger self of family which had been thrown together by marriage or accident : he had never been able to go out from his shell of self . |
| 18 | He had never been able to lose himself in a crowd , or dash off somewhere suddenly on a whim . |
| 19 | ‘ He had never been able to bring himself to talk about it before , ’ he said . |
| 20 | His nanny had scolded him over and over , but he had never been able to stop . |
| 21 | His war record and the fact that he had never been able to catch him redhanded whilst poaching appealed to his old world code of honour . |
| 22 | He had taken the name of Varna from the name of the port from which he had sailed but he had lived his life in terror of deportation , a fear that had haunted him long after it had ceased to be a real threat , so that he had never been able to enjoy his son 's success , seeing it only as something which drew unwelcome attention to the Varna family . |
| 23 | For him the girl in the picture ‘ was made to seem perfectly in context as he had never been able to see people before ’ . |
| 24 | Adam might have escaped the file memories for years , suppressed them and jerked violently away from them , but he had never been able to pretend he was unscathed by those events . |
| 25 | Fred was a kind , considerate man , uncomplicated and loving in his way , but she regretted that he had never been able really to arouse her fully and take her to the height of passion . |
| 26 | " Tricky Dick " Nixon was an astute party politician , but he had never been able to project an appealing public " image " . |
| 27 | He had never been able to hit the animal but he knew how to throw a punch , and the Punk was n't such a good mover as Cobber . |
| 28 | The people in his past had been real once but , although that was a very long time ago , he had never been able to forget them or what they had done to his life . |
| 29 | He had never been able to grasp it himself , never been able to assemble the jigsaw pieces of his identity into a clear recognisable picture . |
| 30 | It was the nature of dogs to eat cats and he had never been able to see the sense of trying to stop them . |