Example sentences of "had been [det] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Before the marriage Maggie had been little more than a drudge round the house . |
| 2 | In the immediate post-war years , the Minister of Defence had been little more than the co-ordinator of the three autonomous Service Ministries and the Ministry of Supply . |
| 3 | The eighteenth century had been marked by keen intellectual enquiry and , among the educated class , some decline in devotion to revealed religion ; but at last leave-taking there had been little to disturb the old familiar ways ; the sense of continuity between life and death , between this world and the next , was carefully preserved . |
| 4 | The ‘ flak helpers ’ had been little more than children at the time of Hitler 's great ‘ triumphs ’ , and in the hail of bombs , the destruction , and the retreating armies , the remaining image of the Führer as the military genius bore scant relation to their daily experience of reality . |
| 5 | Thus the Preface of the Catalogus Plantarum emphasised correct identification as a prime factor for success both in the nursery and the garden , and the text of the work presented a practical guide , suggesting the best uses for the new trees and shrubs with which there had been little experience . |
| 6 | Eckstein found in Mexico that in over three generations , there had been little upward occupational mobility , especially into the white-collar class ( Eckstein 1977 ) . |
| 7 | There had been little damage to Galilee or Rashidiyeh in the exchange of fire but , not far from the entrance to the Palestinian camp , I was briefly introduced to a man who was described as the ‘ leader of joint PLO forces in Rashidiyeh . |
| 8 | His magic , the magic of uncovering a man who had trod the land that I now trod , who died and was laid in the chalk 3,000 years ago , had been little more than pages in a notebook : another find in the ceaseless archaeological round . |
| 9 | Britain had exercised tight control over the entry of aliens for as long as anyone could remember and , anyway , there had been little contact between Germany and Britain for at least nine months . |
| 10 | There had been little real effort to impose a change before the dismissals were made . |
| 11 | It had been a wet , raw winter , with the ground waterlogged and streams running high ; but at least there had been little snow and the hill passes were open , which was just as well for a journey to mid-Annandale . |
| 12 | Most of the inhabitants had probably escaped into the night , and there had been little killing , although a number of women undoubtedly had been caught and forced to pay the price of conquest . |
| 13 | After all , he was a serving liaison officer between the CIA and the White House , even if he had been little more than a sleeper for several years . |
| 14 | There had been little enough to choose between the two killings , yet all the difference in the world between the fates of those responsible : the one retired with honours , the other shot by firing squad at the age of twenty-eight . |
| 15 | She had been little more than a child when I first saw her , but no-one could forget her beautiful , lively eyes . |
| 16 | There had been little luxury in their lives in contrast to Spiro 's second family , who enjoyed the best of everything . |
| 17 | There had been little investigation or calling for witnesses . |
| 18 | He had been discharged but a year later there had been little change in his weight . |
| 19 | But the claim to criticise the world through its literary culture , in its day , had been little short of a claim to rule that culture and that world . |
| 20 | The H3 building had been put up hastily in the early 1950s to get the scientists out of their first accommodation that had been little more than Nissen huts . |
| 21 | Even when they had been little more than babies he had started to corrupt them . |
| 22 | There had been little enthusiasm for the renewal of war in Scotland in 1332 , and apart from his victory at Halidon Hill Edward had scarcely distinguished himself on his Scottish campaigns . |
| 23 | The report was published in July 1986 and concluded that apparently there had been little work done on the effects of skill mix on patient services and that " a higher priority should be given by management to achieving the best value for money by the adoption of methods of allocating staffing resources more closely related to the needs of patients and ward objectives . |
| 24 | The party managers continued to bewail the organizational weakness of Coalition Liberalism , but there had been little opportunity for organizational collaboration ; one of the few joint ventures , a magazine called Popular View , was abandoned in 1921 because of the impossibility of producing a lively magazine out of continuous compromise . |
| 25 | Up to then there had been little or no solid research in this field and the facts as to sexual elements in British society were still arcane . |
| 26 | There was an emphasis on the generation of female employment as well as on the general need for diversification but there had been little development by the outbreak of war . |
| 27 | Up to then there had been little social division in towns and houses were crowded in on themselves in a formless way . |
| 28 | Comparing , for fixed-term contract workers , the results of the 1984 survey with those of the 1980 survey we found that there had been little change . |
| 29 | He had been little more than a boy then . |
| 30 | However , resistance on the part of the Uruguayan government to Soviet overtures in 1959 for a larger share of the market indicated that the agreement had been little more than a contingency measure on the part of Montevideo . |