Example sentences of "[vb past] been of " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | If I 'd been of your chosen few , |
| 2 | I 'd been of less practical help , but Terry had encouraged me to make general criticisms of the scheme . |
| 3 | Like many graduates stimulated by their experiences , he discovered that although he had been of sufficient calibre to acquire the offer of the scholarship in the first place , he now faced the inevitable service obsession with a rejection of academic prowess in preference for ‘ practical skills in the real world ’ ( ibid. 157 ) : |
| 4 | Her memory of the room had been of a dingy , barrack-like hall with fine plaster swags , marred by the fact that chunks of them had been missing , and they , and the room , not improved by having been painted in a weird mixture of colour : purple , pink , green , ochre , rather like the bike belonging to the old man on the S-Bahn . |
| 5 | His first feelings had been of shock and then fear . |
| 6 | Its chairman was John Grierson who had never been particularly interested in responding to the requirements of the commercial market-place , and production control was in the hands of John Baxter , a onetime director whose films had been of the prosaic but worthy variety . |
| 7 | Faith had been of certain mind but easier to please . |
| 8 | My Bible instruction to the lad had been of no avail . |
| 9 | This was largely but not exclusively an obsession of Congregationalists , much as it had been of mediaeval bishops . |
| 10 | It had been of considerable importance to the development of the District 's confidence and reputation in East Anglia in the early twenties . |
| 11 | He had proved himself in battle ; he had been of service . |
| 12 | Rather , I felt a strange exaltation that our brief married life together — consisting of but a few short leaves — had been of such ravishing sweetness , and that I had not spoiled it as I had spoiled things over two years before . |
| 13 | If no organic being excepting man had possessed any mental power , or if his powers had been of a wholly different nature from those of the lower animals then we should never have been able to convince ourselves that our high faculties had been gradually developed . |
| 14 | In it she declared how glad she was to think : ‘ … that the letter written by me to the King of Prussia at a critical moment had been of some use ’ , though quite what effect the letter may have had is unfortunately not spelt out . |
| 15 | Three years of horrifying anarchy and nine governments destroyed what there had been of Ukrainian nationalism . |
| 16 | I know that you came only to honour dear Crabb , at a small informal party , because he had been of assistance to your illustrious father , and valued his work at a time when it meant a great deal to him . |
| 17 | At the same time , it is only fair to point out that my task in this instance had been of an unusually difficult order . |
| 18 | The Victorian historian Macaulay may well have been right when he stated that the Cornish , ‘ … a fierce , bold and athletic race , among whom there was a stronger provincial feeling than in any other part of the realm ’ , were not so much concerned with the matter of religious principle on which Bishop Trelawney had made his stand ; Trelawney was ‘ … reverenced less as a ruler of the Church than as the head of an honourable house and the heir , through twenty descents , of ancestors who had been of great note before the Normans had set foot on English ground ’ . |
| 19 | The poem was the finest Wordsworth had yet written , and , coming so soon after his departure from Alfoxden , suggests that the loss to him of the Quantock countryside had been of little real significance . |
| 20 | This had been of something more than philosophical interest to Karen and I in our pre-coital phase , since it meant that we could count on at least a minute thirty seconds before he reappeared , or as much as three minutes forty-five seconds if we heard the seat go down for a big jobby . |
| 21 | The fact that they have been invited shows me how stone-cold almost sure Conrad Black had been of a Tory victory . |
| 22 | Encouraged by the pride of the town authorities , the Guy Fawkes celebrations provided an annual explosion for the town 's poor : deprived as they had been of saints ' days with the advent of Puritanism , they came from the miserable hovels cramped in the town 's back alleys to protest not only against the symbols of oppression but also , in bad years , against the local oligarchy . |
| 23 | Mary Rose was a kind and simple woman , in awe of her husband , as she had been of her father , as she was of her parish priest . |
| 24 | She had wanted to speak to Debbie after the others had left , and all the talk over lunch had been of the trip to the Tate . |
| 25 | His first impression of Galvone had been of a mobster , but Newman had met other reasonably honest Americans holding high positions who had made the same initial impression . |
| 26 | But he found other allies as well , everyone in fact who had been uneasy with the extent to which traditional Catholicism had been of late put into question . |
| 27 | Bruce meanwhile had launched a lightning raid into north-west England , and after burning Lancaster he crossed into the North Riding of Yorkshire and almost succeeded in capturing Edward himself near Byland Abbey , This humiliation of the king proved too much for Andrew Harclay , whose support had been of crucial importance at Boroughbridge and who had been raised to the earldom of Carlisle a few days after the battle . |
| 28 | In the Electoral College , Reagan 's victory had been of landslide proportions , but the popular vote told a different story . |
| 29 | If John had been of the same family as Jesus , moreover , his ‘ seal of approval ’ would have carried the additional authority of a royal warrant . |
| 30 | In his first schoolboy poetry the theme had been of love withered and decayed — practically the last lines he ever wrote were of " the certainty of love unchanging " . |