Meta-cognition
A good portion of the book is dedicated to Naipaul's time in England. When he finds his paradise in the countryside, he notices how perfectly timeless and eternal the land seems. Then, later, he returns to his writings and tries to rediscover the timelessness of the land, but instead, all he sees is the busy dance of society, hustling, bustling and changing. The effect is that he realizes that he has been projecting himself onto his experience of reality.
Man and nature
Naipaul describes his attachment to nature quite eloquently in the book. Also much of the social observations of the memoir concern the fact that although human experience seems perfectly logical, we're actually just locked into a complex social dance as animals. For Naipaul, the earth and the people are one continuous process.
Jazz age revelry
In the 1920's there was a socialite named Stephen Tennant who made a name for himself as a minor celebrity, and the novel depicts (through fiction) what Naipaul's time was like when he was renting an apartment from Tennant. He was Tennant's tenant.
