'a unifying thread' is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it when you want to refer to an element that ties together diverse parts of something, such as a story or an argument. For example, you could say, "The professor's class had a unifying thread throughout the semester - the connections between literature and history."
There is, it turns out, a unifying thread; it's just not a matter of form.
But it was the "Hallelujah" that afforded a unifying thread of sorts for a program culminating in Beethoven's oratorio "Christus am Ölberge" ("Christ on the Mount of Olives").
There is no single method for choreography to succeed in a musical: It may be a source of isolated highlights or a unifying thread.
And there is a unifying thread: the precious stones motif that Balanchine introduced in 1967 through the colors of Karinska's costumes and Mr. Harvey's original décor.
The publicity says the show "chronicles an outsider's experiences with sex, love, drugs and disco dancing," but if a unifying thread exists it isn't particularly evident.
McQueen is something of a unifying thread in the book and a man with an evident weakness for tomboys: His second wife, Ali McGraw, is pictured just a few pages later in a photo by William Claxton.
The focus on compassion that Merton and I observed in our two religions strikes me as a strong unifying thread among all the major faiths.
Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone wrote in his four-star review that the album was "a daring, imaginative coda to Achtung Baby" and that "it is varied and vigorously experimental, but its charged mood of giddy anarchy suffused with barely suppressed dread provides a compelling, unifying thread".
The unifying thread is a kind of magpie postminimalism, which invigorates familiar abstract strategies -- grids, serial repetition, reductive forms -- using materials scavenged from everyday life.
With an awareness of the exhibition's unifying thread, however, the allusions to travel unravel themselves.
Mr. Carmellini does a lot of things, too, but the unifying thread is not as clear-cut as it can be with many of his contemporaries.
