Example sentences of "had once " in BNC.
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| 1 | Ackroyd notices that the Eliot who had once called poetry a ‘ mug 's game ’ was eventually , in his play The Elder Statesman , to use the same expression for forgery . |
| 2 | The quoted words point back to the privileged second existence which poetry had once promised Jaromil , and they point ahead : the old meaning has been reversed , with the claim that real life resides in a revolutionary solidarity . |
| 3 | Maybe there will one day be a novel from Amis which portrays the Patrick Standish of the Eighties — more baleful , no doubt , on certain subjects , nicer to his cat , surrounded by the monuments of the New Right and by the debris of the swinging past to which he had once been a contributor . |
| 4 | Into the Finn 's head there had strayed , not to be expelled , the words of an English nursery rhyme that a child had once recited to him . |
| 5 | What was that Katrina had once said to me ? |
| 6 | In effect , the alternatives presented to the ‘ counter-culture ’ by the liminal experience were also available to some of us in our marginal police world , and we were forced to see that those concepts of order and disorder we had once taken almost as the natural way of things were in fact only one model for society ; a single framework for social action ! |
| 7 | What had once lasted a generation now lasted a year , what had lasted a year now lasted a month , a week , a day . |
| 8 | What Amanda was wearing underneath had once been a matter of passionate interest to Don . |
| 9 | I did n't chew my nails with regret at giving him my virginity , furious at my weakness in lying down for him , and taking this boy in my arms just because he was English , a citizen of that great nation which had once ruled half the globe : nor did I blame myself for clinging on to an idea even though it meant severing my links with my country , and travelling to London alone without any member of my family . |
| 10 | I had once taken hold of a piece of rock , and was about to trust my whole weight upon , it , when it loosened from its bed , and I should have been sent headlong to the bottom had I not instinctively snatched hold of a tuft of grass , which grew close by it , and was so firm as to save me . |
| 11 | What plodded through the front door was not the lovable , lazy hound who had once lived there but a grim-faced light bulb serial killer ! |
| 12 | ‘ That Christmas ’ ( not that it matters ) was Christmas 1911 , which Pound spent as a guest of Maurice Hewlett 's at the Old Rectory , Broad Chalke , Salisbury — a house which had once been a nunnery , dating back to 1487 . |
| 13 | Darcy focuses his own feelings on an Eritrean woman , a ‘ splendid bureaucrat ’ now based in Frankfurt but currently visiting the front line to renew her networks of information , and dreams hazily of a future sexual relationship with her until he discovers that she had once undergone , at the hands of the Dergue , such stomach-churning extremes of physical torture that ‘ my distance from such a height of anguish disqualified me . ’ |
| 14 | In the case of an eighth-century Pre-Khmer bronze figure of a Bodhisattva , estimated at £40,000-£60,000 , the body had been tested and proved ancient but it was clear that the head had once been broken off and re-attached . |
| 15 | This was the miners , whom Harold Macmillan had once bracketed with the Catholic Church and the Brigade of Guards as institutions with which no Conservative government ought ever to tangle . |
| 16 | It marked a fresh stage in the process of the isolation of the Ulster Unionists from the British political scene — and indeed from the Conservative Party itself which had once proudly named itself ‘ Unionist ’ in the days of Balfour and Bonar Law . |
| 17 | The successive supplements of the Dictionary of National Biography down to 1971–80 , in their way , provided a development of this theme , as they recorded the past achievements of a Churchill , a Bevin , a Montgomery , a Shaw , a Russell , a Rutherford , all that race of former giants who had once trodden England 's green and pleasant land . |
| 18 | He had a grey fringe round back and sides , although a few wisps that had once been fair or ginger were combed over the top . |
| 19 | Eric Abbott , his best man , had once begged him not to become a bishop in England . |
| 20 | It had once been the great hall of the castle , and is among the fairest buildings of the twelfth century which Britain possesses . |
| 21 | Eliot wrote in 1916 that mythology was ‘ dangerous literary material ’ and had to be either a mythology in which the writer believed or else one in which a people had once believed . |
| 22 | In the 1920s the enemy was Labour and the aim was to encourage the desertion of the middle and lower middle classes and the ‘ black-coated ’ workers who had once been the foot-soldiers of Liberalism . |
| 23 | Her mother had once told her scornfully about a crazy book produced on the contemporary new wave of evolutionary theory : a book which abandoned Darwin and returned to his predecessor , Lamark . |
| 24 | No one , not even Fenna , could actually stand up against Rachel when she had once got the bit between her teeth : she was better at the game of controlling , containing , winning , than anyone else that Maggie knew . |
| 25 | Now , with it in her hands , she knew absolutely that it was not a worthless Victorian copy , as Rachel had once told her . |
| 26 | What she did not know was that Moran , with his good looks and military fame , had once been king of these barn dances and now that he had neither youth nor fame would not take a lesser place . |
| 27 | But such is the treacherous role of the trade union leadership that the victory over Grunwick management which had once seemed so near is now likely never to be realised . |
| 28 | There had once been a row at Goodwood when the scrutineers rejected Colin 's car because it did n't have a fireproof bulkhead . |
| 29 | Most working men claimed to know someone who had once been given a trial or had been ‘ on the books ’ of a club for a spell . |
| 30 | Of the eleven who won the Cup for Manchester United in 1948 , most of whom were internationals and all in the first rank of senior professionals , five went into football coaching and management , three ran newsagents ' shops ( customers presumably enjoyed discussing the sports headlines with men who had once made them ) , two worked in factories , and one became a night-telephonist . |