Example sentences of "they [vb past] [been] [prep] [noun pl] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | Father and son exchanged looks , in better temper with each other than they 'd been for years . |
| 2 | They were both drunker than they 'd been for years . |
| 3 | Twenty-five years to the day since England beat West Germany 4–2 in extra time at Wembley to win the World Cup for the first time and , so far , only time in a glorious ( etc , etc — the back pages that morning were awash , as they had been for days , with nostalgia and breast-beating and rush-of-blood reminiscence ) footballing history ; the apotheosis of the game , which , according to one writer at the time , ‘ lives like an extra pulse in the people of industrial England . ’ |
| 4 | It would discourage profit and perhaps take us back to that nadir of Labour party policy when Shirley Williams was able to say with some pride that profit levels were the lowest they had been for years . |
| 5 | Encouraged by the pride of the town authorities , the Guy Fawkes celebrations provided an annual explosion for the town 's poor : deprived as they had been of saints ' days with the advent of Puritanism , they came from the miserable hovels cramped in the town 's back alleys to protest not only against the symbols of oppression but also , in bad years , against the local oligarchy . |
| 6 | It was unreasonable to suppose that an enlargement of Nicholas I 's " personal " principle could fill the vacuum in the countryside , for when the serfs were free they were even more likely to misinterpret dictates from the centre than they had been as bondmen . |