Accents: A Manual for Actors Book

There is a lot of useful and interesting stuff in this book, and although it's aimed primarily at the US market and accents are compared with General American, many of the sections are useful for initially studying key elements of various accents whatever your native accent. I use the word "initially" here, as many of the British accents on the CD are very far off the mark, and I wouldn't want this to be the only guide available. Fortunately the book makes frequent references to sources of natural speakers and seems to be pretty accurate when discussing key elements of an accent.