"found him brighter than during our meeting" – unmatched comparison with 'than'

Question

Contrary to earlier reports I found him brighter than during our meeting.

I read this sentence in a Google Books library of a author Thorpe Edgar, don't know if he is a native speaker or not. Also I couldn't find answer to this question in those pages which were accessible by Google Books preview but I googled for the sentence and found two results. One says replace brighter than with bright, and the other says it's a No Error sentence, but I think it's not an error free sentence as than (a comparative) has been used in the sentence but the clause/subject/object with which comparison is to be made is not present. So what should be the correction? Replacing brighter than with bright?

Answer 1

This is ordinary comparative reduction. In a clausal complement of a comparative, the actual value to which comparison is made is always omitted, and everything except the contrasting element may be omitted:

I found him brighter than [he was X bright during our meeting]
 ↓
I found him brighter than [he was X bright during our meeting]