In the two decades prior to the launch of Cluster, collisionless shocks at which the magnetic field in the unshocked plasma is nearly perpendicular to the shock normal (‘quasi-perpendicular shocks’) received considerable attention. This is due, in part, to their relatively clean, laminar appearance in the time series data. The tendency of the magnetic field to bind particles together owing to their (perpendicular) gyromotion gives rise to this appearance, which facilitated deeper studies into the collisionless processes responsible for the overall thermalization of the principle plasma populations as well as the acceleration of an energetic non-thermal component. Despite the considerable effort, key questions remained unanswered or re-