Example sentences of "had [be] [adv] [adj] [noun] " in BNC.
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1 | It had taken until the long , open left-hander that leads down into Glen Kinglas before my erection had finally subsided , and that had been mostly naked fear ; Verity had lost it just for a second , the rear of the car nudging out towards the wrong side of the road as we whanged round the bend . |
2 | Christopher Knox , defending , said O'Brian had been just 100 yards from where nine men were killed in the Gulf War friendly fire blunder . |
3 | It was the third time in eight games that the margin of victory had been just two runs . |
4 | And that had been just two years ago . |
5 | It seemed like ever since the ‘ sixties there had been just one brand of government in two slightly different packages and nothing much ever changed ; there was this feeling that after the burst of energy in the early-mid-'sixties everything had been going downhill ; the whole country was constipated , bound up with rules and regulations and restrictive practices and just general , endemic , infectious ennui . |
6 | An attractive young woman in her mid-twenties , she had been just one year away from her final examinations as a solicitor when , two years earlier , she had been rushed into hospital for an emergency appendectomy . |
7 | Physically he had been just one millimetre closer to Doreen than ever before , but emotionally he had crossed a frontier . |
8 | If the race had been over 62 metres then I felt I would have won , but there are no championships at this distance so I had to be content with second place . |
9 | Although six per cent said they had , half said the difficulty had been over five years ago . |
10 | At the Jan. 8 round table meeting Peter Koch , who was responsible for disbanding the National Security Office ( and was subsequently dismissed on Jan. 12 ) , revealed that there had been over 85,000 Stasi employees , 25,000 of whom had already been dismissed ; all weapons would be impounded by the end of January . |
11 | Tony Harrison recounts a story about a meeting which is likely to become apocryphal : ‘ There had been over ten accidents in a year on one particular plant and a meeting was held to consider targets for the next year . |
12 | Three years later , the Siemens brothers extended cable communications even further by implementing an 11,000km telegraph line between London and Calcutta , a very considerable achievement , one which had been yet another adventure , the sort that provided — like the Atlantic cable saga — the densely-packed reports and darkly realistic illustration for which the Illustrated London News had become justifiably renowned . |
13 | The kings had been pretty poor specimens as ‘ sons ’ : they showed little enough of Yahweh 's family likeness , and there was a long-standing hope in Israel that one day God would bring into the world a messianic Son , a worthy ruler to sit on David 's throne . |
14 | Previous record books had been rather austere collections of lists , ’ he recalls . |
15 | Timesense told her it had been barely fifteen seconds . |
16 | It had been barely two years since she had opened it with the money her father had left her . |
17 | Although the two canoeists who were ashore had been barely 200 yards inland they had gathered sufficient information to confirm that LACs could land on the beach at Houlgate . |
18 | He had been dead five weeks . |
19 | He had been dead some time . ’ |
20 | She was cold , she had been dead some time . |
21 | In one was a fat , broad-faced man ; the body perfect and soft , as if just dead ; the lid had been glewed together , lengthways , and the weight of the earth had prest down his nose ; his beard was about half an inch long ; the winding-sheet was crape , tied with black ribbons ; and the thumbs and toes with the like ; the date was composed of small nails ( 1665 ) by which it appeared he had been dead seventy-two years ; as were also the figure of an hour-glass , death 's head , and cross bones . |
22 | The boy naturalist Charles Darwin could have shown him a thing or two about that , but Hume had been dead 40 years when Darwin enrolled in Hume 's university of Edinburgh . |
23 | In spite of the social dislocation and consumer privations that Stalinism wrought , it must be said that the ruthless and heavy-handed mobilisation of human and economic resources did succeed in achieving impressive growth rates and in building up a solid industrial infrastructure in what , with the exceptions of Germany and Czechoslovakia , had been largely agrarian countries . |
24 | The general situation had been most unsatisfactory right from the start in 191 7 , even amongst the proletariat of Petrograd , the core of Bolshevik support . |
25 | They had returned on the late theatre train , and it had been most pleasant walking down from the railway station and along the seafront so late at night ; ah , to have a pretty girl by one 's side , and the touch of her lips on yours . |
26 | She had been here four days now , and , true to his word , Jonas had said nothing about Travis or the jade , which now stood in its rightful place in the display cabinet . |
27 | When she had been here three days a man had trailed up the stairs , let in by another tenant , hammering on her door . |
28 | Kuttner Dowd had been here several times , though never when the Society was assembled , as it was tonight . |
29 | While one third of the people lived near or below a stringently drawn poverty line , there had been nevertheless tangible improvements in the living conditions of the bulk of the people after the squalid upheavals of the earlier phase of industrialisation and urbanisation . |
30 | There had been nearly 28,000,000 crimes reported in 1990 , an increase of 13 per cent over 1989 . |