Example sentences of "it [vb past] [adv] been [det] " in BNC.

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1 It had not been such a dull night after all , she mused , hoped Travis 's head would n't be too sore in the morning , then found that , whatever diversions might occur , once the excitement was over she was back to worrying about the wretched mortgage .
2 Petion looked astounded in a repulsed sort of way ; Privately , he wondered who had carved these things , and hoped it had not been some ancestor of his .
3 For a long time after independence , English was the language of the educated élite , just as it had largely been that of the colonial administration .
4 It had n't been much of a picture for dreaming on .
5 It had n't been much of a job after all ; he had thought at first from the sound of it that it might mean travel , but it did n't .
6 It had n't been such a cold night , what had happened ?
7 It had n't been all that friendly to me , but I let that pass .
8 And it had n't been some unknown island wine with mystical aphrodisiac properties , had it ?
9 A man with unfashionably long hair — it had probably been that way since his own undergraduate days , Loretta guessed — was stabbing the air with his fork .
10 Her hatred — if it had even been that — had turned out to be as intensely personal as her love and an intrinsic part of it , Maria acknowledged privately .
11 Alina was holding onto the door , because the six steps that she 'd taken to reach it had almost been enough to exhaust her ; Belov dusted off his hands and came over to her now , and he took her by the shoulders and turned her around and steered her back toward the bed that she 'd just left .
12 And it had all been such a long time ago !
13 In his dream he felt relief because she had n't died , because it had all been some other dream , because she was smiling in the sunshine .
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