1.   It is a fictional story set in the distant past.

2.   Nor are the blight years which affected potato crops in about one year in three, in the not so distant past.

3.   Nurses are no longer expected to sublimate their feelings behind starchy officiousness as has been the case in the not so distant past.

4.   Rivers of molten lava clearly flowed here in the distant past.

5.   The programme describes events which took place in the distant past, towards the end of the last ice-age.

6.   Time and again a permissive present is contrasted with the not too distant past.

7.   We move from the distant past, to the past, to the present, to an even earlier past.

8.   What of that other world, the world of the distant past that now lies beneath our feet?

9.   When he did speak, it was mostly of the very distant past, remembering his brothers as boys.