Example sentences of "they [vb past] been [adj] [noun] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Conditions were better for fishing now than they 'd been all night . |
| 2 | And Lucy called her in the morning , swept away all doubts with a rush of enthusiasm about the exhibition , and only when they 'd hung up did Jay realise that she had n't given her a date , a time ; that she — they ? — were just where they 'd been five months before . |
| 3 | They 'd been minor royalty in some petty , pre-Independence kingdom . |
| 4 | well they were having a biology lesson , she 'd been all about these , they 'd been this biology |
| 5 | And then much of this leeway was made up and the capacity being there er , well the hours of work were getting tackled then , they 'd been longer hours and er I think as a a boy coming out of apprenticeship , er the forty seven hour week had come into being . |
| 6 | Not that you 'd know they 'd been most days . |
| 7 | And poems in a novel simply did n't work ; they 'd been crap poems anyway . |
| 8 | They came to Bedford from the Luton Public Assistance Institution where they had been assistant master and assistant matron . |
| 9 | I wondered whether Lili would agree that they had been best friends . |
| 10 | Jesus , it was one island , that was true , but the terrain made the halves more remote from each other than if they had been two islands separated by a sea channel : you could n't skip across our jungles and mountains in an outrigger . |
| 11 | Good times , yes , they had been good times … |
| 12 | They had been good friends , had helped each other over the years . |
| 13 | And they had been good years . |
| 14 | Even in their heyday they had been fluid entities which could be dormant in specific areas for years at a time , but the decline at the turn of the century was much more widespread than earlier fluctuations . |
| 15 | They had been suffering trading reverses and were anxious to increase their status . |
| 16 | He 'd seen salamanders before , of course , but they had been small specimens . |
| 17 | ‘ We took this out of a Warrior in Oxford Barracks this morning — they had been practising firing at multiple targets , using the power traverse , When suddenly the turret went out of control — It 's a good job they were n't live firing on the range or someone could have been killed . |
| 18 | He had just glanced at his wristwatch , to discover that Cunningham 's arrival still lay approximately two replays of Little Brown Jug in the future , when a woman slid onto the next bar-stool to his and said : ‘ Hello , Harry , ’ in a tone of husky confidence which suggested they had been lifelong friends . |
| 19 | There was often a special pride that the family were ‘ all in the trade ; ’ ‘ all my people have been in the dealing world ; ’ ‘ we 've been blacksmiths for generations ; ’ or they had been self-employed Portland quarrymen ‘ right back a hundred year back . ’ |
| 20 | Oh , they had been happier times ! |
| 21 | Gould , the ornithologist , was with him , and as they had been some days without anything to eat , except what they shot , they enjoyed a good breakfast . |
| 22 | In fact , she had almost convinced herself that they had been some sort of reaction to the arrival of that poison pen letter . |
| 23 | In 1973 Esquire magazine asked a number of famous people where they had been ten years earlier when they heard that John Kennedy was assassinated . |
| 24 | It did not matter whether they had been far-sighted landowners , former artisans or merchants in feudal society ; what is crucial for Marxists is the belief that their ownership of the new and increasingly predominant mode of production led them to have common interests and goals . |
| 25 | From 1859 caves became exciting to geologists , as they had been forty years earlier when Buckland looked for evidence of the Deluge . |
| 26 | They had been communicating disapproval , anger , behind that closed door . |
| 27 | In the beginning they had been manly contests of strength and skill , strictly conducted to emphasize the virtues of morality , honour and courtesy . |
| 28 | They had been old German hulks you know ta brought over to this country after the First World War as part of the reparations and they had been finished off in Liverpool and Glasgow somewhere . |
| 29 | But if they had n't been there , if they had been different kinds of men erm , I do n't think I would have been able to pick someone to be my husband or my partner who could be a decent father to my kids . |
| 30 | Of course there had been interrogation sessions in the Lubyanka , but they had been flimsy affairs , for hanging over their progress had been the sword of a man 's release . |