HARDLY / SCARCELY / BARELY ... WHEN
NO SOONER ... THAN

When a story is told in the past tense, the adverbials hardly, scarcely, barely and no sooner are often used to emphasise that one event quickly followed another. The verb describing the earlier event is usually in the past perfect tense. If hardly, scarcely, barely and no sooner are in the initial position, the subject and auxiliary are inverted:

Hardly had I arrived h ... Đọc thêm