Example sentences of "would [verb] [be] impossible " in BNC.

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1 I would not take office under MacDonald , and yet it would have been impossible to have refused .
2 It appears to be even more prevalent in ‘ socialist ’ states than in ‘ capitalist ’ states : the compulsory movement to ujamaa villages in Tanzania in 1975 would have been impossible in a society which genuinely respected peasant opinion .
3 The words were said with such good humour and aggressive sureness that it would have been impossible to take offence .
4 Take the first ingredient , without which this week 's announcement about a local property tax would have been impossible — the £4 billion ( $7 billion ) switch to value-added tax ( VAT ) in the Budget .
5 So West Indies won by an innings and 156 runs ; yet had England managed to hold on for just another three or four minutes they would have got a draw , for the heavens opened and further play would have been impossible .
6 It would have been impossible for the Falklands War to be prosecuted successfully with every decision coming to the full Cabinet of twenty-three members , a state of affairs that would have taken every other item off the agenda .
7 She had hung up a Breughel pint , and the golden patterns on the wall brought it to life — the Elizabethan diamond panes casting shafts of light and designs which would have been impossible through a modern window .
8 In the single market of next year , these neat divisions would have been impossible to maintain .
9 Shill 's suggestion that his wife committed suicide was dashed by the evidence of Dr Norris , who insisted that most of the head injuries would have been impossible to achieve by someone attempting suicide and that , in the annals of crime , he had yet to hear of a case where a person attempted suicide by bashing his head with a flat iron .
10 It would have been impossible without you !
11 It would have been impossible to predict the way events developed after October 1917 , and the policy of the Party seemed on numerous grounds to be the most sensible , the only one which went some way to reconciling the need for large economic units ( which , rightly or wrongly , was assumed to be decisive for material progress ) and for democracy , understood as the right of peoples to choose their own State .
12 Driving the cattle that was to feed the troops through the Alps was a Herculean task and it would have been impossible without the dogs .
13 None of these methods seemed at the time to have any relevance to therapeutics , and the scientists who developed them would have found it very difficult to persuade the distributors of funds for medical research to support them , but without them the practical advances which came later would have been impossible .
14 Without this progress , understanding the existing drugs and inventing new ones would have been impossible .
15 This would have been impossible unless we camped at the foot of Beinn Eibhinn , or had started from Loch Ossian at dawn , or were two gold medalist fell-runners .
16 This would have been impossible with the yoke-harness , because as soon as the horse begins to pull with it the neck-strap presses on the animal 's windpipe and thus tends not only to restrict the flow of blood to its head , but also to suffocate it !
17 But perhaps Nicholson 's most spectacular achievement was the important part he played in surpassing the performance of the rival Perkin & Sons — a feat that would have been impossible without the cooperation of his friend , and mentor , Hofmann .
18 This would have been impossible without the link provided from postcoded data ( increasingly available from sources such as cancer registries ) to Ordnance Survey ( OS ) grid references .
19 In our case , of course , it would have been impossible , but I know of cases where parents have attempted to keep their adopted children in ignorance of their origins .
20 It seems most unlikely that the testator had any intention of this sort ; and it is pointless to assert that such a decision would have been impossible in a legacy , since the whole context — a disposition charged on a non-heir — is one in which a legacy could not have functioned .
21 They not only allowed the third party an action which would have been impossible at civil law , but also permitted specific performance .
22 Fritz Moeri , one of five people charged in the trial of company officials which began on 18 April , has told New Scientist that the disaster would have been impossible if the system he built in 1970 had not been modified and if ‘ fashionable ’ exhaust valves had not been added at the insistence of company management .
23 The result is that the Viking badge today adorns a range of cars that only a few years ago would have been impossible to imagine .
24 Life , in fact , would have been impossible for most higher forms , with only the hardiest microbes surviving .
25 Even so , it would have been impossible for an insect to grow much larger , say to have a girth more than a quarter of an inch in diameter .
26 It would have been impossible for Liza not to realise her growing power over the opposite sex , nor fail to notice the kind of dumb adoration in which Corporal Carrow held her .
27 On the German side I interviewed Baron von Mullenheim-Rechberg , the Bismarck 's fourth gunnery officer and senior surviving officer , a former assistant naval attaché at the German Embassy in London without whose fluent and colloquial English it would have been impossible to give the film the necessary balance .
28 ‘ As no one could have foreseen the sharp fall in the base rate after Black Wednesday , it would have been impossible to predict that variable rates and the cost of fixed rate mortgages would have fallen so far . ’
29 During Franco , it would have been impossible to do Law Of Desire .
30 It would have been impossible to have brought an airliner into the gallery — they must remain at the Museum 's ‘ out-station ’ at Wroughton , Wilts , but the next best thing was achieved .
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