Example sentences of "[prep] what [verb] [adv] been [adj] " in BNC.

  Next page
No Sentence
1 Certainly they conceded that these activities were popular in the sense that millions of people availed themselves of them but their argument had been that only in a very limited way can we talk of these activities as belonging to the masses : rather they represented the expropriation and packaging of what had previously been popular forms by middle-class organizations and in most cases by businessmen and entrepreneurs .
2 They were no longer men , just the vestigial remains of what had once been human beings .
3 Both were directed towards the formalist reading of literary texts , and some anglophone academics tried to minimize the strangeness of French imports by saying that la nouvelle critique was only offering a new version of what had long been familiar in the Anglo-American academy .
4 The PBS , which came to power soon after its formation in 1985 , gained most of its support from the mainly Christian Kadazan ethnic group and from the Chinese ; however , the party also made some inroads into what had previously been USNO-controlled Moslem constituencies .
5 The officer led him into what had once been some kind of common room .
6 Australia was also forced to take a stand on drift-netting when the establishment of the Australian Fishing Zone in 1979 brought under Australian jurisdiction a Taiwanese drift fleet that had been operating , since the mid 1970s , in what had previously been international waters in the Timor and Arafura Seas off northern Australia .
7 Newcomers often found work in areas that lay outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor and Corporation , in what had once been rural manors ; they moved constantly from one district to another .
8 The important point is that it should be used at a time when for some reason pressure is to be taken off members of the class — putting them in what is virtually a ‘ spectator ’ role can give them time to recover from what had perhaps been inadequate non-projected work .
9 Maurice looked hurt at the very suggestion and suddenly Charlotte felt she was seeing beyond what had once been opaque but was now transparent into the cogs and coils of her brother 's mind .
10 Parsons and his followers had found it ironic that their place of depravity should be built on what had previously been Holy Ground .
11 If the movies were to give their stories a realistic social setting and especially a contemporary setting , and if they were to draw on what had always been some of the major preoccupations of popular fiction , then they would have to define their position carefully with regard to some of the major issues of the day .
12 Sir , — Now that the dust has finally settled on this election we may pause to reflect on what has undoubtedly been one of the dirtiest , and most depressing of exercises in political chicanery .
13 But again , cultural context makes the crucial difference : the appropriation of the romantic , the utopian , and the polymorphous for what has hitherto been marginal , and both demonized and repressed by the centre , and internalized as such at the margins , has quite different effects and implications trom , say , a more general ( post/modern ? ) theory that ‘ anything goes anywhere ’ .
  Next page