Example sentences of "it had once been " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | It had once been the great hall of the castle , and is among the fairest buildings of the twelfth century which Britain possesses . |
| 2 | Who in their right mind would avoid a road or a railway track simply because it had once been the scene of an accident ? |
| 3 | From Robert 's description of the place I presume that it had once been an attic , for it was small , the ceiling sloped , and there was no window set into the wall . |
| 4 | ‘ From Robert 's description of the place , ’ he read , ‘ I presume that it had once been an attic , for it was small , the ceiling sloped , and there was no window set into the wall . ’ |
| 5 | Dark because it had once been the attic of the house and its only natural light came from a tiny oblong of glass set in the sloping roof . |
| 6 | He never forgot how it had once been , never seemed to regard her in any other way but as the person who had cared for him and loved him without reservation . |
| 7 | It had once been the offices of a film company and inside we found a dozen Iraqi soldiers in battledress , claiming to be Palestinians , members of the Arab Liberation Front . |
| 8 | Boy thought he would like to see the city under heavy snow ; then it would look like a real map , all in black and white , the river a thick black ribbon , or , if frozen as he knew it had once been , a clean white ribbon , the only space in the city without streets , names , lights or indeed owners . |
| 9 | Flat expanses of sand conjured up images of the savannah it had once been : giraffes picking leaves from high branches , an antelope grazing , and young zebras running in circles while their mothers eye a drowsy lion in the long grass . |
| 10 | Ray Shepherd was a tall man with a craggy , lined face that looked as if it had once been weathered but was now the colour of chalk . |
| 11 | He saw the house as it had once been , in his childhood — still , ordered , each thing in it the finest and most beautiful example of its kind . |
| 12 | Then I remembered that , in the car was the last red rose from Bayeux — I placed it on the rough ground outside the house , and prayed for the family whose happy , safe home it had once been . |
| 13 | It had once been a middle-of-the-road paper with a big circulation and had traditionally reflected the views , or prejudices , of its middle-of-the-road readers . |
| 14 | The 1970s , however , produced a third approach : Transnationalism , which claimed that the state was no longer the dominant actor it had once been . |
| 15 | The little finger on his left hand would be permanently stiff and the hand , though almost entirely usable , was not the shape it had once been . |
| 16 | The NKLP 'S sister party in the south , the SKLP , had suffered serious reverses in 1949 at the hands of the Rhee government and was no longer the force it had once been . |
| 17 | Not the skull , but the thought of the live person it had once been : a woman with eyes and hair who was dead now . |
| 18 | He seemed to inhabit his own world , set apart from them ; and Ruth hardly remembered it had once been her world too . |
| 19 | It had once been a ‘ spaghetti-junction ’ of railway lines , all converging on Don caster , a couple of miles distant . |
| 20 | She stared up from the ground , her wings hanging loose as if she no longer had strength to hold them to her body , her left wing seeming bent as if it had once been broken . |
| 21 | It had once been a well , serving the monastery , but when the Red Guards had come they had filled it with broken statuary , almost to its rim , and now the water — channelled from the hills above by way of an underground stream — rose to the lip of the well . |
| 22 | It had once been the master bedroom and looked out on the woods to the east . |
| 23 | It had once been possible to trust a few Fascist families , especially those who had sons who had deserted from the army on 8 September ; but that was changing . |
| 24 | Susan closed her eyes , and imagined her arm as it had once been . |
| 25 | This was because once economic stability had been regained it was doubtful whether Europe would ever become the significant world power it had once been . |
| 26 | The poor girl 's hair was mud-caked but it had once been well combed and dressed with oil . |
| 27 | Presumably it had once been attached to her bag . |
| 28 | As will be seen , I had not quite expelled from my system the preoccupation with Rowse 's views ; and while one barrier to their expression had been removed , the other — that the book was no longer the target it had once been — had just been erected . |
| 29 | It had once been Chris Patten 's task to help Mrs Thatcher as she worked through the night . |
| 30 | The petal was faded now but it had once been bright pink . |