The interviews hang together superbly as a collection, largely because Gambotto has … the astonishing ability to reveal the absolute essence of a person.

- Australian Bookseller & Publisher

The title is apt: an interview with Gambotto often has the studied savagery of the corrida amid the crystal cruet ambience of high tea at the Ritz. Such ritualistic disembowelling, highly entertaining and in stark contrast to the asinine, PR-driven pap of most modern 'profiles,' leave the gored stirred and very shaken.

- from Undercover Agent by Murray Waldren

Thus, Jean Baudrillard - (French philosopher and) the pride of a new academic orthodoxy - and Antonella Gambotto … play quite similar tricks.

- Meanjin

Antonella Gambotto … obviously cares, not merely about herself, but about ideas and passionately, about words. Whilst some have found her writing ‘cruel’ - the young can be very cruel, as Stephen Knight used to say - I found it tough-minded while enjoying her prose with its - Italianate? - tendency to rococoquetry.

- Don Anderson, The Sydney Morning Herald

Geoffrey Wheatcroft called their tool of trade ‘the killer interview’. Mark Lawson christened the movement ‘jugular journalism’. It was like a bullfight, he said. ‘Fifteen hundred words flash by, a succession of passes with the muleta, and then comes estocada, and another carcass is dragged away by the mule-team’ … [Gambotto is] one of our matador-interviewers.

- The Canberra Times

On the page, Gambotto’s words can snap and bark like terriers worrying prey at bay. She seems to mesmerize, to winkle out ever more personal revelations from her subjects, the tired-and-emotional type of home truths that usually punctuate a long lunch. This, coupled with a merciless eye for minutiae and a matador’s instinct for the kill, has produced some notable confrontations.

- The Australian Magazine

Gambotto asks the difficult questions and elicits information that her subject often hasn’t publicly revealed before … highly intelligent … opinionated, irreverent, candid … and challenging.

- Juice

Gambotto’s command of language is delicious to the point where one wonders which came first, her wish to display her ability or the desire to share her impressions.

- The Newcastle Herald

Antonella Gambotto is a rare writer. She has the ability, with an economy of words and amazing descriptive ability, to give her celebrity profiles startling clarity … Gambotto’s work is intriguing, captivating, and necessary reading for anyone who wants to know what some of those elusive ‘famous’ people are really like.

- The Bendigo Advertiser

The best pieces are the group observations: the male prostitutes, about the short and brutish lives of the workers at The Wall; and the extraordinary harridans who work as bondage and discipline mistresses. These are keen portrayals, beyond the spotlight-rabbit effect of the high-voltage interview, and prove that Gambotto can indeed write.

- Jennifer Byrne, The Sunday Age

Hilarious … Lunch of Blood makes for a pretty satisfying meal.

- Mode

Gambotto probes like Freud, interrogates like Poirot and writes like a woman possessed.

- Jessica Adams, Cleo

She’s copped flak from some quarters, but Antonella Gambotto’s interviews can paint more vivid word-pictures than most of the ham-fisted efforts presented in living technicolour on television … a delicious collection of penetrating insights.

- Terry Sweetman, The Sunday Mail

Witty.

- Brisbane News

Highly entertaining.

- The Daily Telegraph

Unflinchingly reported … notorious.

- The Sydney Weekly