"sweep of time" is perfectly correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe a period of time, especially one with rapid or significant change: "The sweep of time had brought great transformation to the small village in the past century."
That Plouffe: a farsighted strategist with a political nanny cam on the full sweep of time.
Fidel was at the center stage of world events for an extraordinary sweep of time.
Rather than surveying a sweep of time, the book explored core samples of four years: 1929, 1939, 1948, 1955.
We cannot stop the inexorable sweep of time, he says, but we can inflect it with a human voice and touch.
She takes on so many characters, so much history, and such a vast sweep of time without a single unnecessary word.
"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.
A Trio Sans-Pareil When an encyclopedic museum like the Metropolitan announces recent acquisitions, the list invariably covers a broad sweep of times and cultures.
Fortey, who was a senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London until his retirement in 2006, is comfortable with great sweeps of time.
What qualities did it take for these survivors to make it through vast sweeps of time, and are human beings as durable?
In detection and attribution studies, we beat down the large noise of year-to-year and decade-to-decade variability by looking at changes over longer sweeps of time.
Although the Henry VI plays, written when Shakespeare was still in his 20's, are decidedly less conscientious than his later plays in hewing to the historical record, divergences tend to be the result of the playwright's need to compress vast sweeps of time into a manageable drama.
