"Carry Me Across the Water" is a short book, and it remains, despite its narrative sweep of time and geography, something of a chamber piece.

Yet, because Russian opera tends to be so text-driven, the Kirov singers were actually quite engaged with the narrative sweep of the music.

She felt that she lacked a gift for music of narrative sweep, which she assumed opera demanded.

His is "a brilliant work of narrative sweep and analytic depth."

After that, things grow tedious, in large part because this relentlessly verbose book is almost completely lacking in narrative sweep.

Answers to the many questions about the disease lay in the unlikeliest places, which lends Mr. Max's narrative unusual sweep, both historically and geographically.

No painting in the show has the pictorial and narrative sweep of Japanese scrolls.

Yet the film has little narrative sweep.

Best of all, his gargantuan research (or, rather, Byatt's comic parody of research) was assembled into a masterpiece of narrative sweep and clarity.

This is fiction based on legend, "by any standard, an extraordinary film, a work of narrative sweep and visual beauty," Mr. Scott wrote in The Times.