Ostler studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received degrees in Greek, Latin, philosophy, and economics.
He later studied under Noam Chomsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his PhD in linguistics and Sanskrit.
The story focuses on the rise, spread, and dominance of Latin, both among other languages of the Italian peninsula in the early part of the 1st millennium BC and among the languages of Western Europe in the Dark Ages and beyond, presenting the life of Latin as any biographer would present the life of his subject.
However, the title, 'Ad Infinitum,' refers not to this, but to his thesis that the Latin-speaking world was unconscious of its own limits, looking always back to its centre, rather than outwards.
In 2013, he wrote the foreword for Navlipi, the publication of a universal script that deals with phonemic idiosyncrasies inherent in all the world's languages.